QOS

QOS

1. Quality Operating System.

2. Quality of Service (QoS). Networking term for guaranteed throughput based upon measurable transmission rates, error rates and other factors.

Typically QoS would allow a given protocol (for example SMTP, POP3, HTTP) to have a guaranteed proportion of bandwidth available to it. When those protocols are not in use any available bandwidth should still be available to other protocols. This provides a means of ensuring that certain types of network traffic get priority even when the network connection is under heavy load or at full capacity. In a practical scenario, in an office environment it could mean that emails could still be sent and received quickly even whether others are downloading large files which would otherwise slow email traffic down.

QoS is also known as network traffic prioritisation (which assigns priorities to types of traffic) or IP throttling (which limits the effective speed of traffic).