Differentiated services (or DiffServ) is a computer networking architecture that specifies a simple and scaleable mechanism for classifying and managing network traffic and providing quality of service (QoS) on modern IP networks. DiffServ can, for example, be used to provide low-latency to critical network traffic such as voice or streaming media while providing simple best-effort service to non-critical services such as web traffic or file transfers. It is a 6-bit field used to identify the level of service a packet receives in the network. It is part of IP header.