The rules used to arrange jobs or orders in queue, such as FIFO, LIFO, critical ratio, value, customer, combination with similar jobs, etc.

The "triage" of important activities, bringing up most mission-critical functions first, according to the stated business continuity plan or disaster recovery statement.

Also called CoS (class of service), classifies traffic into categories such as high, medium, and low. The lower the priority, the more “drop eligible” is a packet. E-mail and Web traffic are often placed in the lowest categories. When the network gets busy, prioritization ensures critical or high-rated traffic is passed first, and packets from the lowest categories may be dropped.

To list in descending order of urgency/action