Traffic Shaping

Imagine driving on the road and coming to a point where there is road construction. One side of the road is blocked, and the other is regulated by someone to allow incoming and outgoing traffic flow. The idea here is not necessarily to prioritize some vehicles but to ensure smooth movement of incoming and outgoing traffic. In networking, Traffic Shaping works similarly to this real-world scenario.

What is Traffic Shaping?

Traffic Shaping is a mechanism in Quality of Service (QoS) to ensure a network's bandwidth distribution fairness for all different types of traffic. It divides the bandwidth fairly for every traffic in the network.

How does Traffic Shaping Work?

In Traffic Shaping, you define some traffic as a higher priority than others using different network or packet schedulers. Traffic Shaping prioritizes traffic by using different types of traffic or packet schedulers, such as:

• Class-Based Queuing (CBQ): It sets classes and bandwidth limits and queues them up. CBQ is not suitable for gaming and VoIP services.
• Priority Queuing (PRIQ): Prioritizes traffic.
• Hierarchical Fair Service Curve (HFSC): Operates on hierarchies of packet queues to guarantee high-quality VoIP services and online gaming networks.

Benefits of Traffic Shaping in VoIP apps

• Preferential treatment: It allocates higher bandwidth to specific traffic than others to minimize jitter, buffering and packet loss.
• Unfairness removal: It ensures smooth transmission of data packets with reduced bandwidth. Preventing congestion in the network helps to ensure reliable audio and video calling experience in VoIP applications.

Frequently Asked Questions