Chapter 12. Optimizing Your Network Design

Optimization is a critical design step for organizations that use high-bandwidth and delay-sensitive applications. To achieve business goals, these organizations expect their networks to use bandwidth efficiently, to control delay and jitter, and to support preferential service for essential applications. Internetworking vendors, such as Cisco Systems, and standards bodies, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), offer numerous options to meet these expectations. This chapter introduces the reader to some of these options.

The chapter starts with a discussion of IP multicast techniques that minimize bandwidth utilization for multimedia applications. The chapter continues with a discussion of methods for optimizing network performance to meet quality of service (QoS) requirements. These methods allow applications to inform routers of their load and latency requirements, and let routers share QoS information amongst themselves and with policy servers.