Which protocol is important for ensuring performance for time-sensitive data like audio or video?

Quality of Service (QoS) is a critical protocol for managing and ensuring performance for time-sensitive data, such as audio and video streams. QoS prioritizes network traffic to ensure that high-priority data, especially real-time applications like VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and live video streaming, are transmitted with minimal delay and packet loss.

This is essential in scenarios where the timeliness of data delivery significantly impacts user experience and overall application performance. QoS can allocate bandwidth, prioritize specific types of traffic, and implement traffic shaping techniques to maintain the quality and reliability of these time-sensitive services.

In contrast, the other protocols mentioned do not inherently address the performance requirements of time-sensitive data. For instance, HTTP is a protocol used primarily for transferring hypertext over the web and does not provide mechanisms to prioritize real-time data. FTP is focused on transferring files and similarly lacks features to ensure timely delivery. SNMP is used for network management and monitoring but does not directly influence the performance characteristics of data transmission in terms of time sensitivity.