scope:

The purpose of this document is to define an information model to describe the quality of service (QoS) mechanisms inherent in different network devices, including hosts. Broadly speaking, these mechanisms describe the properties common to selecting and conditioning traffic through the forwarding path (datapath) of a network device. This selection and conditioning of traffic in the datapath spans both major QoS architectures: Differentiated Services and Integrated Services.

This document should be used with the QoS Policy Information Model (QPIM) to model how policies can be defined to manage and configure the QoS mechanisms (i.e., the classification, marking, metering, dropping, queuing, and scheduling functionality) of devices. Together, these two documents describe how to write QoS policy rules to configure and manage the QoS mechanisms present in the datapaths of devices.