Traffic shaping essentials

Traffic shaping allows us to prioritize some traffic over other traffic, in order to optimize/improve network performance, and in some cases, lower latency. The purpose of traffic shaping is to make network traffic conform to certain predefined constraints, generally known as either a traffic profile or contract. Your service level agreement (SLA) and/or traffic conditioning agreement (TCA) with your ISP defines what traffic your ISP will accept. One of the basic parameters of this is the data rate. If packets are sent from your local network to the ISP in such a way that violates these agreements, forwarding upstream may be denied. At the very least, forwarding may be not guaranteed. Thus, it is in our interests to make sure that the traffic leaving our network does not violate these agreements, and we utilize a traffic shaper to make sure our traffic...