Expedited Forwarding can be used to built a network that is low in latency, loss, and jitter with assured bandwidth between a client and its destination.
Expedited forwarding guarantees a bandwidth rate with a minimum departure rate and the lowest possible delays with specialised low-latency queuing.
Expedited forwarding also prevents starvation of other applications or classes that do not utilise the expedited forwarding per-hop behaviour by policing traffic when congestion occurs.
Packets that require expedited forwarding should be marked with a binary value of 101110 in their differentiated services field.
Bits 5 to 7 of the expedited forwarding field map to IP Precedence 5 on type of service to allow for backwards compatibility on non differentiated services devices.