Quality of Service

The KanREN backbone is enabled for multiple levels of QoS to facilitate the broad spectrum of services we provide. To the member site, there are two distict categories of traffic that may be selected:

• Real-Time Media. This class is used for interactive media services such as videoconferencing, VOIP, etc., but generally not used for streaming services, as streaming clients buffer several seconds of data. Real-time media applicaitons typically are UDP oriented.
• Best Effort. This class should be viewed as the "remainder" class behind real-time media. Most "Internet" type traffic, typically TCP traffic, falls into this delay-tolerant category. As much bandwidth as is available after the real-time class has been services will be used for best-effort.

Member sites using real-time media may work with KanREN to properly "encode" the correct DSCP (Differentiated Services Code Point) values into packet headers of traffic being sent into the KanREN network to ensure proper delivery. Likewise, sites connected via the KanREN aggregation layer may select the amount of bandwidth on their access circuit that is dedicated to the real-time media class - in both directions: Towards the member from the KanREN backbone, and towards the backbone from the member.

QoS configurations often become complicated very quickly. We highly advise discussion with KanREN engineering staff when deciding on a QoS implementation for your WAN connection. We should also point out that QoS cannot effectively be used as a measure to deal with severely oversubscribed connections. Generally, attempting to use QoS features to uncongest heavily congested circuits creates more problems than it sovles.

If your site is interested in configuring QoS on your KanREN connection, contact KanREN!