User's Manual Part 2

Overview
Chapter 6: Using Traffic Shaper 153
Chapter 6
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..................................................................................................153
Setting Up Traffic Shaper.........................................................................155
Predefined QoS Classes............................................................................156
Adding and Editing Classes......................................................................157
Deleting Classes .......................................................................................161
Restoring Traffic Shaper Defaults............................................................162
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
Using Traffic Shaper