User guide

Overview
Chapter 9: Using Traffic Shaper 293
Chapter 9
This chapter describes how to use Traffic Shaper to control the flow of communication to
and from your network.
This chapter includes the following topics:
Overview .................................................................................................. 293
Setting Up Traffic Shaper ......................................................................... 295
Predefined QoS Classes ............................................................................ 296
Adding and Editing Classes ...................................................................... 298
Viewing and Deleting Classes .................................................................. 302
Restoring Traffic Shaper Defaults ............................................................ 303
Overview
Traffic Shaper is a bandwidth management solution that allows you to set bandwidth
policies to control the flow of communication. Traffic Shaper ensures that important traffic
takes precedence over less important traffic, so that your business can continue to function
with minimum disruption, despite network congestion.
Traffic Shaper uses Stateful Inspection technology to access and analyze data derived from
all communication layers. This data is used to classify traffic in Quality of Service (QoS)
classes. Traffic Shaper divides available bandwidth among the classes according to weight.
For example, suppose Web traffic is deemed three times as important as FTP traffic, and
these services are assigned weights of 30 and 10 respectively. If the lines are congested,
Traffic Shaper will maintain the ratio of bandwidth allocated to Web traffic and FTP traffic
at 3:1.
If a specific class is not using all of its bandwidth, the leftover bandwidth is divided among
the remaining classes, in accordance with their relative weights. In the example above, if
only one Web and one FTP connection are active and they are competing, the Web
connection will receive 75% (30/40) of the leftover bandwidth, and the FTP connection
will receive 25% (10/40) of the leftover bandwidth. If the Web connection closes, the FTP
connection will receive 100% of the bandwidth.
Using Traffic Shaper