Qos and UCA

[pkriek]

Hi

we have fixed phones on seperate vlans's. UCA phones are on laptops.
Now we want to implement Qos for the UCA softphones, Anyone knows how to do this?  The softphones are on the normal LAN, so we need to see whichtraffic should be prioritized.

I have read about DHCP and DSCP. But still have no idea how to do this

Thanks for helping!

[acejavelin]

How this is done will vary depending on your router/switches... Most enterprise grade switches have the ability to prioritize data based on the type of traffic, and UCA Softphones are basically SIP softphones, so if you setup your switches to give priority to SIP traffic over other traffic that will likely the best way to implement this.

How many softphones and how large or high-traffic of an environment are we talking here though? If we are talking 5 UCA softphones and an "average" office network with the UCA and MCD server in the same physical location, then switch level QoS is probably not really an issue. Generally QoS issues are at choke points, such as the router between the two VLANs, which would be the real point you need to honor QoS so that queueing of data between the VLANs is handled properly.

[LoopyLou]

The IP phones can tag their packets with layer 2 and layer 3 priority. The phones receive their QoS via options in DHCP ( DHCP is the process used to get an IP address ). Part of QoS is layer 3 priority called DSCP.

Most PC's can't tag their packets and therefore you  need to figure out how to expedite the packets from the PC's with UCA softphones on your network. It maybe be like acejavelin suggests, expediting SIP, but the SIP protocol is only used for call setup. Voice still uses RTP after setup.