# Traffic prioritization

You can ensure that essential or time-critical traffic flows without delays by giving it a higher priority value.

Even under normal traffic conditions, temporary traffic peaks sometimes occur. With many communications, slight delays caused by queuing traffic are not noticeable to the user of the service. However, some connections, such as streaming audio or video, are time-critical, and even relatively minor delays cause noticeable reduction in service quality.

Normally, when packets are queued, they are sent onwards in the same order in which the packets were received. To change this behavior, you can assign priority values to the traffic. For example, you can assign time-critical connections a high priority. High-priority packets are placed before any lower-priority packets in the queue, allowing the fastest possible delivery.

Active Queue Management (AQM) reduces the volume of dropped or retransmitted packets when there is network congestion. AQM monitors the average queue size and uses a scheduling algorithm to determine the statistical probability for dropping incoming packets. If the queue is almost empty, all packets are accepted. As the queue size increases, the probability for dropping incoming packets also increases. When the queue is full, all packets are dropped.