End-to-End QoS Network Design : Quality of Service in LANs, WANs, and VPNs

Rating:
Summary: Good Treatment of an Arcane Subject.
Review: Welcome to Quality of Service (QoS). Life used to be so simple, you went to Ma Bell and ordered just what you wanted in switched or dedicated circuits and you got a (more or les) clear channel from Point A to Point B. But then we moved to packet switching where everything being sent is broken into small packets, given a destination address and thrown out into a big communications pipe with billions of other packets, each madly striving to get to its own destination.

This book starts with the early history of making some packets more equal than others (to borrow from George Orwell) so that time sensitive packets (like voice) have a priority over data for which a few tenths of a scond delay is not critical. It marches to the drumbeat that proper QoS structure in your network will provide satisfactory service to each user with the minimum outlay for bandwidth.

The book has enough background and basic information to be helpful to the user, and continues as far as you want to go into the details of individual pieces of equipment. Being as the book is from Cisco Press, obviously Cisco equipment is featured, but it is general enough to be of use with older legacy equipment and that of other manufacturers. It's the most complete book I've seen on the subject.