Traffic management refers to network bandwidth control and allocation, communication delay reduction and congestion minimization. Traffic management is often called Traffic shaping or traffic engineering. The objectives of the traffic management and engineering is to manage network resources efficiently and provide users the bandwidth and service level as desired. Many advanced statistical techniques such as queuing theory are used to predict and engineer the behaviour of large telecommunications networks such as telephone networks or the Internet.
The following are some popular rules used in the traffic management and shaping and engineering:
- By application: Identify and categorize specific types of network traffic, constraining each particular category of traffic to use no more than a specified amount of bandwidth. For example, you may categorize traffic based on macroscopic characteristics, such as the traffic's protocol (IP, IPX, AppleTalk, DECNet, etc.), the ports an application is known to use, or on the basis of connections to a particular well-known host, etc. Traffic can also be categorized based of the content of the flow regardless of the flow's macroscopic characteristics.
- By user: Set per-user traffic limits to ensure that network traffic is shared fairly among all users or set a guaranteed amount of bandwidth for a particular user. For instance, you might decide to use a per-user rule that limits traffic to or from each user to no more than 512Kbps.
- Priority management: Define the relative importance, or priority, of different types of traffic. The lower priority traffic can be allowed bandwidth only when higher priority applications don't need it.
Basic features of a traffic management system includes:
- Capacity planning
- Measuring and modeling traffic
- Monitors access and response time to all network devices, application and service ports
- Monitors interface traffic for bandwidth utilization and error status
- Monitors SNMP enabled devices with polling and trap reception
- Monitors device Sys-logs
- A reporting system on performance, load balancing, Service Level Agreement (SLA), which include parameters such as QOS, bandwidth allocation etc.
Related Terms: Network management, Performance management, capacity planning, Service level agreement, QOS