Traffic Shaping - Uses

Uses

Traffic shaping is sometimes applied by traffic sources to ensure the traffic they send complies with a contract which may be enforced in the network by a policer.

It is widely used for network traffic engineering, and appears in domestic ISPs' networks as one of several Internet Traffic Management Practices (ITMPs).

Nodes in an IP network which buffer packets before sending on a link which is at capacity result in a traffic shaping effect. This can appear at for example a low bandwidth link (such as dial-up), a particularly expensive WAN link or satellite hop.

Traffic shaping is often used in combination with:

• Differentiated services, Integrated services — including traffic classification and prioritization.
• Weighted round robin (WRR)
• Random early detection (RED), Weighted RED (WRED) and RED In/Out (RIO) — Lessens the possibility of port queue buffer tail drops and this lowers the likelihood of TCP global synchronization.
• A number of port queue buffers.
• VLAN tagging IEEE 802.1q