How does automated QoS work?

We mentioned last time that, as more and more application traffic (including voice) joins IP networks, the ability of enterprises to get their arms around quality of service provisioning and management is growing more important. Some of the router vendors, including Alcatel and Cisco, have begun automating this process for their switches and routers. Their early systems focus on voice over IP, for the obvious reason that VoIP is the most persnickety of applications in terms of latency and jitter.

We mentioned last time that, as more and more application traffic (including voice) joins IP networks, the ability of enterprises to get their arms around quality-of-service provisioning and management is growing more important. Some of the router vendors, including Alcatel and Cisco, have begun automating this process for their switches and routers. Their early systems focus on voice over IP, for the obvious reason that VoIP is the most persnickety of applications in terms of latency and jitter.

Alcatel announced automated QoS in the form of a network management feature called OneTouch last summer. OneTouch is a capability of the PolicyView module in Alcatel’s OmniVista 2000 Version 2.0 network management software. It uses preconfigured QoS templates to enable network managers to configure QoS settings once, then distribute them across multiple, distributed switches, says John Reidy, a senior product manager at Alcatel

Similarly, Cisco’s AutoQoS feature, released earlier this year for Cisco switches – and last month, for use on most Cisco WAN edge routers – also uses templates to automate policy and QoS provisioning networkwide. Cisco routers support perhaps the industry’s most exhaustive list of QoS features. But the company finally realized that the richer its portfolio of QoS features became, the more overwhelmed enterprises grew at the prospect of tackling QoS.

According to Cisco, AutoQoS reduces the network manager’s QoS provisioning tasks down to just three steps: configuring an IP address, specifying the amount of bandwidth on a link, and enabling the Cisco AutoQoS feature. The router maker says it has calculated that AutoQoS reduces the complexity, cost and time of QoS provisioning by two-thirds.

The Alcatel and Cisco template-based automated QoS systems work in similar ways.

Cisco AutoQoS, for example, detects the underlying network protocols and connection types. It identifies the application traffic on the network using the crown jewel in Cisco’s QoS arsenal, a capability called Network Based Application Recognition, or NBAR. AutoQoS matches the autodiscovered network variables to a template that has the proper configuration settings to automatically invoke all the appropriate marking, classifying, queuing, and fragmenting parameters. 

In theory, this means you should no longer have to worry about how to group application traffic into service classes, figure out which link-layer protocols are running, and determine which specific QoS features to turn on and how to configure them for each service class.