Traffic Shaping

Traffic shaping (also known as "packet shaping" or ITMPs: Internet Traffic Management Practices) is the control of computer network traffic in order to optimize or guarantee performance, lower latency, and/or increase usable bandwidth by delaying packets that meet certain criteria.IETF RFC 2475 "An Architecture for Differentiated Services" section 2.3.3.3 - definition of "Shaper" More specifically, traffic shaping is any action on a set of packets (often called a stream or a flow) which imposes additional delay on those packets such that they conform to some predetermined constraint (a contract or traffic profile).ITU-T I.371 : Traffic control and congestion control in B-ISDN Section 7.2.7 defines and discusses Traffic Shaping in B-ISDN Traffic shaping provides a means to control the volume of traffic being sent into a network in a specified period (bandwidth throttling), or the maximum rate at which the traffic is sent (rate limiting), or more complex criteria such as GCRA. This control can be accomplished in many ways and for many reasons; however traffic shaping is always achieved by delaying packets. Traffic shaping is commonly applied at the network edges to control traffic entering the network, but can also be applied by the traffic source (for example, computer or network cardIEEE INFOCOM 2001. Arsenic: a user-accessible gigabit Ethernet interface Pratt, I., Fraser, K., Computer Laboratory, Cambridge University; Twentieth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Proceedings 2001 Volume 1, pages: 67-76 vol.1. Describes a gigabit Ethernet NIC with transmit traffic shaping.) or by an element in the network. Traffic policing is the distinct but related practice of packet dropping and packet marking.Cisco Tech Notes: Comparing Traffic Policing and Traffic Shaping for Bandwidth Limiting. Document ID: 19645 Graphs illustrate differences in typical output