In
computer networking
A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...
, network traffic control is the process of managing, controlling or reducing the network traffic, particularly Internet
bandwidth
Bandwidth commonly refers to:
* Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range
* Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...
, e.g. by the
network scheduler
A network scheduler, also called packet scheduler, queueing discipline (qdisc) or queueing algorithm, is an arbiter on a node in a packet switching communication network. It manages the sequence of network packets in the transmit and receive q ...
.
[M. Noormohammadpour, C. S. Raghavendra]
"Datacenter Traffic Control: Understanding Techniques and Trade-offs,"
IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. PP, no. 99, pp. 1-1. It is used by network administrators, to reduce
congestion,
latency and
packet loss. This is part of
bandwidth management
Bandwidth management is the process of measuring and controlling the communications (traffic, packets) on a network link, to avoid filling the link to capacity or overfilling the link,https://www.internetsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/BWro ...
. In order to use these tools effectively, it is necessary to
measure the network traffic to determine the causes of network congestion and attack those problems specifically.
Network traffic control is an important subject in
datacenters as it is necessary for efficient use of
datacenter network bandwidth and for maintaining service level agreements.
[
]
Traffic shaping
Traffic shaping is the retiming (delaying) of packet
Packet may refer to:
* A small container or pouch
** Packet (container), a small single use container
** Cigarette packet
** Sugar packet
* Network packet, a formatted unit of data carried by a packet-mode computer network
* Packet radio, a fo ...
s (or frames) until they meet specified bandwidth and or burstiness
In statistics, burstiness is the intermittent increases and decreases in activity or frequency of an event.Lambiotte, R. (2013.) "Burstiness and Spreading on Temporal Networks", University of Namur.
One of measures of burstiness is the Fano factorâ ...
limits.[ Since such delays involve queues that are nearly always finite and, once full, excess traffic is nearly always dropped (discarded), traffic shaping nearly always implies traffic policing as well.
]
Traffic policing
Traffic policing is the dropping (discarding) or reduction in priority (demoting) of packets (or frames) that exceed some specified bandwidth and or burstiness limit.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Network Traffic Control
Network performance