/mcpBandwidth Management Bandwidth management is about ensuring the best possible user experience end-to-end for all voice and video endpoints, clients, and applications in the Collaboration solution. The Cisco Collaboration on-premises Preferred Architecture provides a holistic approach to bandwidth management that incorporates an end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) architecture, call admission control, and video rate adaptation and resiliency mechanisms to ensure the best possible user experience for deploying pervasive video over managed and unmanaged networks. Bandwidth Management Architecture for Collaboration With recent increases in the number of interactive applications – particularly voice and video applications – real-time services are often required from the network. Because these resources are finite, they must be managed efficiently and effectively. If the number of flows contending for such priority resources were not limited, then as those resources become oversubscribed, the quality of all real-time traffic flows would degrade, eventually to the point of becoming useless. To address this requirement the Cisco Collaboration on-premises Preferred Architecture provides a strategy that leverages "intelligent" media techniques, QoS, and admission control to prevent real-time applications and their related media from oversubscribing the network and the bandwidth provisioned for those applications, thus ensuring efficient use of bandwidth resources. Figure 20 illustrates the approach to bandwidth management used in the Cisco Collaboration on-premises Preferred Architecture. This approach consists of the following phases: • Identification and classification — Refers to concepts of trust and techniques for identifying media and signaling for trusted and untrusted endpoints. It also includes the process of mapping the identified traffic to the correct DSCP markings to provide the media and signaling with the correct per-hop behavior end-to-end across the network for both trusted and untrusted endpoints. • Queuing and scheduling — Consists of general WAN queuing and scheduling, the various types of queues, and recommendations for ensuring that collaboration media and signaling are correctly queued on egress to the WAN. • Provisioning and admission control — Refers to provisioning the bandwidth in the network and determining the maximum bit rate that groups of endpoints will utilize. This is also where call admission control can be implemented in areas of the network where it is required. • Monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimization — Ensures the proper operation and management of voice and video across the network. Cisco Prime Collaboration offers a suite of tools to perform these functions.