Guide: Traffic Prioritization

Overview

Konnect OS provides a Quality of Service (QoS) mechanism that prioritizes IP traffic to ensure that critical or time-sensitive applications receive preferential forwarding over limited WAN bandwidth.

When multiple applications compete for WAN bandwidth, QoS ensures that higher priority traffic is transmitted first, maintaining service quality for business-critical applications.

Konnect OS supports four traffic priority levels:

The QoS scheduler processes packets in strict priority order:

Realtime → High → Standard → Low

Traffic in a higher priority queue is always processed before traffic in lower queues.

Prioritization becomes important only when WAN bandwidth is congested.

How It Works

Traffic prioritization is configured using three components:

Maximum Information Rate (MIR)

To ensure QoS operates correctly, each WAN priority level must have a Maximum Information Rate (MIR) configured.

The MIR defines the maximum bandwidth available for a WAN path.

This allows the QoS scheduler to properly manage bandwidth contention and enforce prioritization.

Example configuration:

The system will not transmit above the MIR defined for that WAN priority.

Example Use Case

Prioritizing VOIP and Operations Traffic over Crew Access

Consider a network with three user groups:

The goal is:

1. Ensure VOIP traffic receives the highest priority.

2. Allow Operations traffic to have higher priority than Crew traffic.

3. Prevent Operations traffic from consuming excessive bandwidth.

Step 1 — Configure the WAN Profile

First configure the WAN profile that defines WAN link priority and MIR values.

Navigate to:

SD-WAN → WAN Profiles

Configure WAN priority order.

Example configuration:

Set MIR values for each WAN link.

This allows QoS scheduling to operate correctly.

Step 2 — Configure Access Network Priority

Next, assign default priority to each access network.

Navigate to:

LAN → Access Networks

Set the Internet Priority for each network.

Example configuration:

This ensures that voice traffic receives the highest priority by default.

Step 3 — Prioritize VOIP Applications

Crew network traffic is normally low priority, but voice or video calls from crew devices must still receive high priority.

To accomplish this, create a Device Traffic Policy.

Navigate to:

LAN → Device Traffic Policies

Create a rule:

This ensures voice calls receive the highest priority regardless of device or network.

Step 4 — Limit Operations Network Bandwidth

Operations traffic should have high priority, but must not consume all available bandwidth.

To prevent this, create a Network Traffic Policy.

Navigate to:

SD-WAN → Traffic Policies

Create a shaping policy:

This ensures operations traffic cannot starve lower priority networks.

Resulting Traffic Behavior

With this configuration:

If WAN congestion occurs:

Realtime traffic transmitted first
↓
High priority traffic
↓
Standard traffic
↓
Low priority traffic

This guarantees that voice calls and operational applications remain responsive even during network congestion.

Best Practices

1. Always configure MIR values for WAN links.

2. Use Access Network priorities for user groups.

3. Use Traffic Policies to prioritize specific applications.

4. Apply rate limits to prevent lower priority networks from being starved.

5. Test prioritization behavior under load conditions.

Summary

Konnect OS QoS ensures efficient use of WAN bandwidth by prioritizing critical traffic.

The configuration involves three key elements:

Access Networks → Define default priority
Traffic Policies → Identify and prioritize applications
WAN Profiles → Define WAN paths and bandwidth limits

This architecture enables network administrators to maintain optimal performance for mission-critical services even when WAN bandwidth is limited.