Abstract
Rapid development in multimedia broadband applications in the last decade has led towards higher bandwidth demand, which has resulted in quality of service issues for business critical applications. Researchers have suggested internet traffic classification and prioritization as a solution to the problem but still the complexity of available solutions is a fertile research area. In this paper, traffic classification and prioritization was performed using FreeBSD (v8.1) operating system for a small and medium enterprise network, the system and network performance results are presented for optimum performance conditions. Though researchers have worked on open source systems for traffic classification but the computation of impact of classification on system and network performance, and to suggest optimum performance conditions is still a fertile research area. The implementation is done by using FreeBSD (v8.1) IP Firewall (IPFW), pipes and queues, on an Intel 3.0 GHz machine and the results are presented for critique review and discussion. The key challenges faced and open issues are also discussed for future research.