What is meant by Traffic Shaping, what it is used for and how to manage the traffic of your corporate network in an optimal way
The term traffic shaping identifies a particular technique that is used for network traffic management that allows you to modify and customize the data flow on one specifies Internet backbone or a specific part of a private network (both LAN and corporate).
What is meant by Traffic Shaping
Use the traffic shaping technique in your company will allow you to optimize or ensure the best performance and speed of the internet network. Also, it is very useful for you to be able to reduce latencies and, at the same time, increase the bandwidth within a specific type of packet (for greater precision a type of data traffic, for example video streaming) compared to others (for example, the traffic arriving from file protocols sharing).
Traffic Shaping: what is this technique for
It is important to clarify, in a simple way, what this technique is for in practice. Traffic shaping is used when a certain network manager or administrator intends, or is obliged, to do so give different priority to package types that pass through its network.
Let’s take an example that clarifies the concept. If a content from a portal, or website, gets a excessive influx of visitors at the same time, a high increase in latency. This term refers to the waiting time for a user browsing a website.
A serious consequence can also be the total blocking of accesses and it is precisely in these cases that the function of traffic shaping is important. The latter, in fact, allows the network administrator to manage the amount of information that transits from the nodes monitored by him in a precise time frame.
If necessary, the administrator can decide to intervene by making one limitation of the outgoing network speed. This allows to avoid that the available bandwidth is totally filled (event that causes the blocking of accesses and, therefore, the complete unavailability of the servers).
The different types of Traffic Shaping
There are different types of traffic shaping. The most common type of technique that is mostly used and applied is called application based. The latter allows you to make precise changes to the priority of packages that are created by an application. Common examples of this kind are streaming online, the p2p traffic or data coming from gaming.
These packages are attributed a larger part of data band or, vice versa, it comes reduced the maximum limit. When can this happen? For example, if the administrator of a portal senses that a video uploaded to his platform has been very successful and has become so viral that it can fill all the available bandwidth, he can choose to limit the data flow and apply a limit to the bandwidth that it is guaranteed to multimedia packages. This allows other types of data, present on the portal of the operator, to be able to have at the disposal of free band (in case it is needed, for example, for the e-mail service).
Similarly, those involved in providing internet services, called in the ISP sector, have the right to choose to filter, through firewall, file sharing data traffic (i.e. p2p). In this case, the internet speed reserved for downloading content from the web is reduced. The purpose of this action is to maintain the data transport capacity unaltered for other types of traffic (such as video communication and e-mail).
Rely on professional services to manage the traffic of your corporate network
Traffic shaping allows you to take full advantage of the usable bandwidth on the Intranet ed Extranet, favoring the performance of core services. It is essential to choose a dynamic solution for your business. In fact, in this case, even in the absence of Internet traffic, the entire band can be destined for a single user, or it can be distributed over several users in a totally automatic way.
Through professional solutions, you will be able to obtain a correct functioning of all services, thanks to the monitoring of the band used. A good traffic shaping service allows you to manage them at the user level bandwidths and the priority. This allows you to create VIP user groups in a few simple steps. In addition, it will be possible to eliminate the risk of gaming applications using transmission bandwidth that is detrimental to core services.