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Qos Network Design

Vin25
Level 1
Level 1

Hey, I'm working on this project and could use some help. I'm trying to show that Quality of Service optimization for a network is way better than regular optimization. I'm using Cisco Packet Tracer to illustrate the network design before (no Quality of Service) and after (with Quality of Service).

Initially, I thought about using ping tests to talk about latency improvements, but I'm wondering if there are other cool ways to show or explain this. Also, the network design is for a startup, and I'm cool with checking out other free software options, as long as I can show the before and after network design.

Any ideas or help in coming up with a not-so-easy-but-not-too-complicated network design for a startup would be great too. So I need help with a design and other ways to explain that Quality of Service optimization for a network is better.

Thanks!

7 Replies 7

Ramblin Tech
Spotlight
Spotlight

"QoS" can mean different things to different people, but I believe the essence of what you want to show is that, during times of network congestion (ie, queueing), the delivery of higher priority traffic takes precedence over the delivery of lower priority traffic. (Conversely, when there is no congestion, there is no differentiation in treatment of traffic). This requires several things of your simulation/demonstration:

 - An explicit QoS policy that objectively prioritizes classes of traffic and quantitatively establishes relative treatment of classes

 - A means of identifying the relative priority classes of packets

 - A means of enforcing the QoS policy on the traffic classes

 - A means of generating traffic

 - A means of congesting the network to demonstrate that the policy is actually working.

The demonstration could be as simple as two traffic sources sending to a single receiver, each on separate interfaces on a single switch/router. As long as the ingress offered load from the two sources exceeds the egress transmission capacity to the receiver (even very briefly), you will have congestion. Your policy could prioritize one source over another, one traffic class over another from one of both sources, or any combination that you can think of. If the received traffic matches your policy, you have success.

Cisco's MQC (Modular QoS CLI) provides the means to encode the QoS classification and enforcement into class-maps and policy-maps. While I have not used Packet Tracer, I cannot comment on its support of class-maps and policy-maps, but I can say that a ping alone is unlikely to produce a successful demonstration.  That is, you are unlikely to see any difference in ping times with QoS applied versus without QoS applied in the absence of congestion. So you will need to ensure that there is adequate "background" or "noise" traffic present during your ping test so that there will be queueing taking place (without queueing, QoS queue management and scheduling are essentially null functions).

In real life, operators test the QoS capabilities of network elements by connecting them to special-purpose traffic generators (Spirent, Ixia, etc) and blast away. They then compare the received traffic to the configured policy to see if the QoS actually works as designed. A software-only demonstration can be used, as long as you are only looking for coarse results, not fine-grained.

Disclaimer: I am long in CSCO

Joseph W. Doherty
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame

QoS rarely does much "optimization".  It's more about bandwidth management (when there's congestion as noted by @Ramblin Tech ).

Unsure how well PT might demonstrate the effectiveness of QoS, if at all.

Firstly, PT often doesn't support advanced features.  Secondly, PT, or any software emulator, may skew or hide any QoS benefits.

The simplest demonstration I used to do, showing the "power" of QoS was place two routers back-to-back, and ping and/or telnet one to the other, starting with an unloaded link.

Then, would have a UDP traffic generator source try to send 110% link capacity.  With such, ping generally timed out and telnet access was horrible!

Lastly, enabled FQ on egress interface, and ping and/or telnet performance very closely returned to unloaded link stats at start.  The latter while link at 100% load and dropping 10% of UDP traffic.

Clearly, the forgoing, showed the power of QoS, but as most interfaces don't show sustained congestion, the benefits of QoS, were usually disregarded until voice and/or RT video started being used.  But even without those, QoS often provides a much more consistent performing network.

Okay, able to download and open PT file - and then what?

For example, if i go to PC4 and browse yahoo.com, it should take longer time than it already shows. Because now its shows 0.022; something close to that. But i want it to be longer like more than 0.100 if possible. That is for HTTP. But for ICMP and VOIP is the same. All the time u can check in the simulation mode. When i call ip phone3 to ip phone6 it take 0.023 but i want it to be longer. ICMP if i ping somethin it should take longer too or introduce packet loss.

 

the following is the other topology where i want it to be the better one. This one has few qos configurations.