12 Facts About Traffic shaping

Traffic shaping is a bandwidth management technique used on computer networks which delays some or all datagrams to bring them into compliance with a desired traffic profile.

Traffic shaping is used to optimize or guarantee performance, improve latency, or increase usable bandwidth for some kinds of packets by delaying other kinds.

Some controversial cases of application-based traffic shaping include bandwidth throttling of peer-to-peer file sharing traffic.

Route-based traffic shaping is conducted based on previous-hop or next-hop information.

Traffic shaping can be used to prevent this from occurring and keep latency in check.

Traffic shaping provides a means to control the volume of traffic being sent into a network in a specified period, or the maximum rate at which the traffic is sent, or more complex criteria such as generic cell rate algorithm.

Traffic shaping is commonly applied at the network edges to control traffic entering the network, but can be applied by the traffic source or by an element in the network.

Data centers use traffic shaping to maintain service level agreements for the variety of applications and the many tenants hosted as they all share the same physical network.

Traffic shaping is a specific technique and one of several which combined constitute bandwidth management.

Traffic shaping is of interest especially to internet service providers.

Traffic shaping is thus a good means for companies to avoid purchasing additional bandwidth while properly managing these resources.

Traffic shaping defines bandwidth rules whereas application acceleration using multiple techniques like a TCP performance-enhancing proxy.