Maintaining quality of service treatment of packets using security parameter index values

A system comprising:

• one or more processors;
• and
• one or more non-transitory computer-readable media storing instructions that, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform operations comprising:
• receiving, from a client device, a request to establish an encrypted tunnel through a network such that data-plane traffic flows between the client device and a service via the encrypted tunnel;
• determining that the data-plane traffic is of a particular traffic class from among a group of traffic classes, the particular traffic class being associated with a particular quality of service (QoS) performance metric;
• generating a security parameter index (SPI) value to be used by the client device for the data-plane traffic, the SPI value corresponding to the particular traffic class;
• sending, to the client device, an indication of the SPI value;
• receiving, from the client device, a data packet of the data-plane traffic that includes the SPI value;
• and
• based at least in part on the data packet including the SPI value, sending the data packet through the network such that the data packet is handled according to the particular QoS performance metric.

A non-transitory computer-readable media storing instructions that, when executed by one or more computing devices, cause the computing devices to perform operations comprising:

• receiving, from a client device, a request to establish an encrypted tunnel through a network such that data-plane traffic flows between the client device and a service via the encrypted tunnel;
• determining that the data-plane traffic is of a particular traffic class from among a group of traffic classes, the particular traffic class being associated with a particular quality of service (QoS) performance metric;
• generating a security parameter index (SPI) value to be used by the client device for the data-plane traffic, wherein a first portion of the SPI value corresponds with the particular traffic class;
• sending, to the client device, an indication of the SPI value;
• receiving, from the client device, a data packet of the data-plane traffic that includes the SPI value;
• and
• based at least in part on the data packet including the SPI value, sending the data packet through the network such that the data packet is handled according to the particular QoS performance metric.