Carrier
Ethernet supports a host of latency-sensitive applications that are often critical
to an enterprise (for instance, regular telephony services), and consequently offers
better fault-tolerant and recovery mechanisms.
Quality of Service Providing Quality of Service (QoS) is necessary for Carrier Ethernet
to be embraced as a substitute to ATM and Frame Relay and ultimately as a converged
mechanism to deliver all services. QoS essentially conforms to a predefined level of performance
expected by an application. As Carrier Ethernet supports delivery of critical
enterprise applications that are commonly expected to adhere to certain performance
levels, this QoS capability becomes essential.
The challenge to a Service Provider is significant given the fact that it has to simultaneously
support individual QoS to typically thousands of applications and end users,
using a limited set of resources (bandwidth, switching, and so on) whose availability
varies with time.
Carrier Ethernet services providing QoS, encompass the following:
?– Performance Service Level Agreement (SLA) There is the capability to provide
the stringent end-to-end9 SLAs necessary to provide a host of critical voice,
video, and data services over a converged Ethernet infrastructure.
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