Regardless of the size or purpose of your network, you will derive benefits from optimizing the performance of your network. One of the means we have of optimizing the performance is through traffic shaping, which allows us to manage traffic in such a way that some packets are prioritized over others. Without traffic shaping, packets are processed on a first-in, first-out (FIFO) basis. While this might be adequate in many cases, in other cases it can lead to saturated connections and increased latency.
The traffic shaper does its job by examining packets leaving network interfaces. If packets meet certain criteria, they are treated differently. In this sense, implementing traffic shaping is similar to implementing firewall rules. Yet rather than pass, block, or reject packets, we place packets that match the traffic-shaping criteria into separate queues. Priority...
