Which QoS mechanism will drop traffic if a session uses more than the allotted bandwidth?
- policing
- shaping
- marking
- congestion management
Explanation: Policing is a Quality of Service (QoS) mechanism designed to monitor traffic sessions and ensure they do not exceed their allotted bandwidth. When a session violates the configured rate, a policer typically takes one of two actions: it either drops the excess traffic or re-marks it to a different class of service, usually one with a higher drop probability.
In contrast, shaping is a traffic-smoothing tool that does not drop traffic. Instead, it uses buffering to delay and smooth out traffic spikes so the session never exceeds the contracted rate. Furthermore, congestion management (queuing) is used to avoid dropping packets by temporarily storing them in buffers until network resources become available. Because policing makes instantaneous decisions to drop packets rather than delaying them, it is often preferred at the ingress (entry) point of a network to save bandwidth and CPU cycles.
Related exam: Modules 1 – 7: Checkpoint Exam: Network Switching Answers (CCNP ENCOR v9)
