Quality of Service (QoS) is a method of prioritizing network traffic to allow for better functionality of essential services. This could be done by filtering traffic based on port numbers, applications and MAC addresses. Traditionally these options needed to be configured manually which may prove to be difficult for inexperienced users. These days there are options for automatic (QoS) where the devices chooses how to prioritize traffic. One example of this is called Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) which prioritizes traffic from high to low based on four categories. Options like WMM will dynamically allocated more bandwidth to more essential tasks. You can also manually configure these settings to align with the objectives of your organization. In the graphic below we can observe how voice, video, and other functions are categorized using QoS WMM.
Quality of Service (QoS) is a networking concept that refers to the mechanism which controls the data flow of traffic. QoS was designed as a method to improve the performance and efficiency of computer networks. QoS is generally used on dedicated systems that have a higher need for continuous operation and the proper function of business essential resources. This could be essential applications, teleconferencing and voice over IP (VoIP).
QoS works by identifying which network traffic is most critical to an organization by identifying their packets on the network. It then prioritizes this traffic by reserving bandwidth on the network for these critical resources. The type of traffic, amount of bandwidth and other preferences can be configured by the network administrator or other network professional. Once these preferences have been configured the network will automatically executed this procedure to maximize performance for these resource intensive tasks (Fortinet, n.d.).