Prioritized traffic for higher quality user experience
Wi-Fi CERTIFIED QoS Management™ delivers a consistent, end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) treatment in Wi-Fi® networks by enabling devices, applications, and network managers to prioritize traffic flows. This ensures appropriate traffic prioritization for time sensitive applications and services, resulting in enhanced quality of experience for end users in residential, enterprise, and public networks.
Wi-Fi continues to enable connectivity for real-time services and applications, such as videoconferencing, interactive gaming, augmented and virtual reality, industrial IoT and healthcare monitoring, which require low latency. It is important that differentiated QoS treatment is applied consistently for these services to provide a high quality experience that can adapt to dynamic changes in the wireless channel conditions, such as peaks in traffic demand and/or interference.
Wi-Fi QoS Management™ benefits and features
Wi-Fi QoS Management™ extends WMM® by enabling access points (APs) and client devices to negotiate and/or request identified IP flows be assigned to particular access categories. It supports a wide range of use cases, including client-centric use cases, where the AP is requested to perform QoS treatment for selected downlink IP flows. Wi-Fi QoS Management also supports network-centric use cases where the client device is requested to perform QoS treatment for certain uplink IP flows, resulting in the following key benefits:
- Better experience with real-time applications
- Reduced latency
- Prevention of outages in emerging immersive applications
- Reduced lag time in access to interactive cloud and edge services
Wi-Fi QoS Management certification delivers a standardized approach to QoS for devices and applications to prioritize traffic flows for both client devices and APs. Wi-Fi QoS Management features four key technologies:
- Stream Classification Service (SCS): enables classification and Wi-Fi QoS treatment of specific IP flows, including flows to and from 5G core networks, allowing sensitive traffic such as gaming, voice, and video to be prioritized over bulk data traffic
- Mirrored Stream Classification Service (MSCS): enables a client device to request the AP to apply specific QoS treatment of downlink IP flows using QoS mirroring
- Differentiated Service Code Point (DSCP) mapping: aligns QoS treatment across Wi-Fi and wired networks and also enables network managers to configure specific QoS policies
- Differentiated Service Code Point (DSCP) Policy: enables dynamic configuration of clients with DSCP policies for specific uplink IP traffic flows, allowing them to be marked with different DSCP values and further improving the experience with applications requiring low latency such as XR.
Wi-Fi QoS Management in action
When using interactive gaming, the interactions among the participants must be timely and without skipped sounds or stalled video. To ensure smooth gameplay and a good quality of experience with minimal lag time requires low latency. A gaming app on a mobile device needs to communicate with one or more internet servers to synchronize play across all users and has specific QoS requirements for instant communication with those servers, even when contending with other network traffic. Using MSCS, the gaming application is able to prioritize its traffic on the network, reducing latency and improving the gaming experience.
