Congestion can occur in many different locations within a network and is the result of many factors, including oversubscription, insufficient packet buffers, traffic aggregation points ,network transit points, and speed mismatches (such as at LAN-to-WAN links). Simply increasing link bandwidth is not adequate to solve the congestion issue, in most cases. Aggressive traffic can fill interface queues and starve more fragile flows such as voice and interactive traffic. The results can be devastating for delay-sensitive traffic types, making it difficult to meet the service-level requirements these applications require. Fortunately, there are many congestion management techniques available on Cisco IOS platforms, which provide you with an effective means to manage software queues and to allocate the required bandwidth to specific applications when congestion exists. This module examines the components of queuing systems and the different congestion management mechanisms available on Cisco IOS devices.