Any network has the possibility of resource contention. Unless the network has significantly more capacity than users at any given time, it will become necessary to devise methods to classify traffic, assign priorities, and choose how to apply those priorities. Complicating this task is the fact that in order to give one class of traffic higher priority, you have to give others less. Since not all applications have the same needs, it is often possible to have a configuration that achieves an acceptable compromise. Nevertheless, different organizations have different needs. A multimedia production company or department will need reliable, fast transfer of large files. An e-commerce facility, on the other hand, performs large numbers of relatively small transactions, but in a distributed environment, small delays can produce noticeable performance degradation for the final user.

• Choose an application that is both useful to a business and is sensitive to network behavior, such as latency, loss, or jitter (inter-packet timing). Propose a configuration for an enterprise LAN that provides the best performance for that application. Analyze the possible conflicts with other applications in this scenario.
• Propose methods you would use to evaluate the relative needs of the applications.
• Discuss which tools and techniques you would use to assess the needs of different applications and users.
• Repeat your analysis for endpoints that are on different continents. Possible new constraints include increased latency, reduced bandwidth, link failure, contention with other traffic in the cloud, and other institutions' or carriers' policy enforcement or traffic-shaping.