About QoS
You should consider that in an ever-changing network environment, QoS is not a one-time deployment, but an ongoing, essential part of network design.
This section describes the QoS features available on the ASA.
Supported QoS Features
The ASA supports the following QoS features:
-
Policing—To prevent classified traffic from hogging the network bandwidth, you can limit the maximum bandwidth used per class. See Policing for more information.
-
Priority queuing—For critical traffic that cannot tolerate latency, such as Voice over IP (VoIP), you can identify traffic for Low Latency Queuing (LLQ) so that it is always transmitted ahead of other traffic. See Priority Queuing.
What is a Token Bucket?
A token bucket is used to manage a device that regulates the data in a flow, for example, a traffic policer. A token bucket itself has no discard or priority policy. Rather, a token bucket discards tokens and leaves to the flow the problem of managing its transmission queue if the flow overdrives the regulator.
A token bucket is a formal definition of a rate of transfer. It has three components: a burst size, an average rate, and a time interval. Although the average rate is generally represented as bits per second, any two values may be derived from the third by the relation shown as follows:
average rate = burst size / time interval
Here are some definitions of these terms:
-
Average rate—Also called the committed information rate (CIR), it specifies how much data can be sent or forwarded per unit time on average.
-
Burst size—Also called the Committed Burst (Bc) size, it specifies in bytes per burst how much traffic can be sent within a given unit of time to not create scheduling concerns.
-
Time interval—Also called the measurement interval, it specifies the time quantum in seconds per burst.
In the token bucket metaphor, tokens are put into the bucket at a certain rate. The bucket itself has a specified capacity. If the bucket fills to capacity, newly arriving tokens are discarded. Each token is permission for the source to send a certain number of bits into the network. To send a packet, the regulator must remove from the bucket a number of tokens equal in representation to the packet size.
If not enough tokens are in the bucket to send a packet, the packet waits until the packet is discarded or marked down. If the bucket is already full of tokens, incoming tokens overflow and are not available to future packets. Thus, at any time, the largest burst a source can send into the network is roughly proportional to the size of the bucket.
Policing
Policing is a way of ensuring that no traffic exceeds the maximum rate (in bits/second) that you configure, thus ensuring that no one traffic class can take over the entire resource. When traffic exceeds the maximum rate, the ASA drops the excess traffic. Policing also sets the largest single burst of traffic allowed.
Priority Queuing
LLQ priority queuing lets you prioritize certain traffic flows (such as latency-sensitive traffic like voice and video) ahead of other traffic. Priority queuing uses an LLQ priority queue on an interface (see Configure the Priority Queue for an Interface), while all other traffic goes into the “best effort” queue. Because queues are not of infinite size, they can fill and overflow. When a queue is full, any additional packets cannot get into the queue and are dropped. This is called tail drop. To avoid having the queue fill up, you can increase the queue buffer size. You can also fine-tune the maximum number of packets allowed into the transmit queue. These options let you control the latency and robustness of the priority queuing. Packets in the LLQ queue are always transmitted before packets in the best effort queue.
How QoS Features Interact
You can configure each of the QoS features alone if desired for the ASA. Often, though, you configure multiple QoS features on the ASA so you can prioritize some traffic, for example, and prevent other traffic from causing bandwidth problems. You can configure:
Priority queuing (for specific traffic) + Policing (for the rest of the traffic).
You cannot configure priority queuing and policing for the same set of traffic.
DSCP (DiffServ) Preservation
DSCP (DiffServ) markings are preserved on all traffic passing through the ASA. The ASA does not locally mark/remark any classified traffic. For example, you could key off the Expedited Forwarding (EF) DSCP bits of every packet to determine if it requires “priority” handling and have the ASA direct those packets to the LLQ.