QoS General Overview
General QoS Information
N3's 6 layer Quality of Service (QoS)
Brief overview
6 layer Quality of Service (QoS) is a digital network solution that prioritises your network traffic, including voice and multi-media, to ensure that your key data has precedence over less important traffic during times of congestion. 6 layer QoS ensures that each designated bandwidth channel has a protected minimum level. 6 layer QoS is effective when a service is being operated at close to its maximum bandwidth (i.e. when traffic is congested) as it makes best use of the available bandwidth at any given time. 6 layer QoS is flexible; a class can burst into the bandwidth of other classes if it is unused.
Traffic is classified on source, destination or applications type. Once classified, end-user traffic is placed in different queues. These queues have different properties (e.g. like a road with a bus lane), enabling more important traffic to pass through the network in a timely fashion. These details are ‘configured' onto each site's CPE devices remotely by N3SP.
Introduction
6 layer Quality of Service (QoS) is a digital network solution that prioritises your network traffic, including voice and multi-media, to ensure that your key data has precedence over less important traffic during times of congestion. This state-of-the-art IP Virtual Private Network, which combines the performance, reliability and security of a leased-line network with the any-to-any scalability and flexibility of an IP network, identifies/tags key data traffic and processes it into predefined channels within the overall bandwidth resources available on your catalogue service. Once identified, the relative importance of the data traffic is maintained through the centrally pre-assigned 6 layer QoS policy. This policy is a framework that allows customisation to build upon the initially developed configurations. Please note that 6 layer QoS is only relevant under congestion conditions, the scheme allows data traffic to burst into any spare bandwidth in times of low usage. 6 layer QoS does not give you access to more bandwidth but enables better use of the bandwidth available and ensures that key data takes priority.
EF - Voice over Internet Protocol
AF3 - National Applications
AF4 - Media Streaming
AF2 - Community Applications
AF1 - Bulk Data Transfer
DE - Default (all other Traffic)
N3 6 layer QoS - 6 channels
The N3 scheme has six QoS channels designed to cater for the wide variety of traffic types found on a converged network.
The six categories are:
AF1 - Bulk Data Transfer
This is a class used when applications need to move large volumes of data. Traffic into this channel is expected from applications like - PACS, NHSmail, overnight server backups to data centres, or large data file transfers between large NHS sites.
AF2 - Community Applications
This is for predominantly transactional applications that have a local significance.
Examples are:
- Locally hosted GP Systems
- SBS Finance System (Shared Business Services)
- IPSEC (N3 VPN) local site to local site
AF3 - National Applications
This is for predominantly transactional applications that have a national significance.
Examples are:
NCRS (National Care Record Service) to and from the BT NASP data centre, including, but not limited to:
- SSB (Spine Security Broker)
- IA (Identity Agent)
- PSIS (Personal Spine Information Service)
- EBS (Electronic Booking Service) a.k.a. Choose and Book
LSP CRS (Care Record Service applications offered by each LSP) including, but not limited to:
- PAS
- GP EPR
- Clinical Systems
- Emergency bundles
- RIS
- https
- Ad-Hoc image requests
- ESR (Electronic Staff Record)
- Remotely hosted GP Systems
EF - VoIP traffic
AF4 - multimedia + VoIP signalling
DE - Default (all other traffic not assigned to a QoS Layer)
This is for any traffic that doesn't fit into any of the above channels.
Benefits of 6 layer QoS
6 layer QoS offers key data management and does not give improved services to all of your applications at the same time. Should you discover that you are consistently getting network congestion issues due to the amount of applications or services you are using you have two potential options:
- Ensure that you are not leaving multiple applications open at the same time, even if an application is not being accessed it will be using some bandwidth just to stay open.
- Consider upgrading your catalogue service - check out the CRM or speak to your customer engagement representative from N3SP to discuss the options available to you.
Increased Network Optimisation
As organisations face increasing pressure to deliver more with less, maximising productivity throughout better management of resources becomes paramount. With a 6 layer QoS enabled network, organisations will have the opportunity to prioritise network traffic as best suits their requirements.
Improved Responsiveness and Flexibility In today's rapidly changing business environment it is imperative that your organisation's support infrastructure is flexible and easily deployed. For large organisations N3SP will seek to engage with customer technical teams to advice on optimising network configuration settings.
