Quality of Service (QoS)

Traffic Shaping

Traffic shaping essentially limits the amount of bandwidth that can be consumed by certain types of applications. It is primarily used to ensure a high quality of service for business-related network traffic. The most common type of traffic shaping is application-based traffic shaping.

Traffic shaping is a bandwidth control technique. It is used on computer networks and delays some or all datagrams. Traffic shaping is created to comply with a specified traffic profile. Traffic shaping maximizes or guarantees performance, boosts latency. It can also increase available bandwidth for certain kinds of packets. Application-based traffic shaping is the most common form of traffic shaping.

The goal of configuring traffic shaping is to buffer and queue excess packets above the committed rates. Traffic shaping is less likely to drop excess packets because excess packets are buffered. It buffers packets up to the length of the queue. Drops may occur if excess traffic is continuous at high rates. It typically avoids retransmissions due to dropped packets. One drawback of configuring traffic shaping is, it can introduce delay due to queuing, particularly deep queues.