Network traffic control
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In computer networking, network traffic control is the process of managing, prioritising, controlling or reducing the network traffic, particularly Internet bandwidth, used by network users, to reduce congestion, latency and packet loss. This is part of the article on bandwidth management.
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[edit] Introduction
In order to use these tools effectively, it's necessary to measure your network traffic to determine the causes of network congestion and attack those problems specifically, rather than randomly applying the tools listed here in the hope that they will help.
[edit] Techniques
[edit] Patches
It's very important to keep computers up to date with security fixes. Worms and viruses can use a lot of network bandwidth, and are normally prevented or fixed by applying the appropriate operating system patches.
Windows machines in particular require a lot of patches, and downloading them also takes a lot of bandwidth. This can be reduced by centralising updates with the Windows Server Update Services. This would seem to require that you have a Windows machine that's left running for 24 hours a day, and regularly checked for available updates, which must be selected to be deployed to the other machines on the network.
Antivirus software is not essential to bandwidth management, although it can help to control network worms, but it may also use significant bandwidth to download updates. Most good antivirus software has systems for corporate use, designed to download updates automatically onto one computer and deploy them across the network, but they are often not easy to use, and sometimes expensive.
[edit] Traffic Shaping
Traffic shaping can help to ensure that large downloads don't interfere with the speed of Web access, by restricting the bandwidth available for the downloads, and prioritising web traffic over downloads. The Linux and BSD open source operating systems have such features built in.
For more details please see the Traffic Shaping page.
[edit] Quotas
Universities and other shared networks often allocate a quota of bandwidth to each user, on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. This helps to reduce excessive usage, such as constant high usage, while still allowing fast network performance for occasional users. For example:
- The Australian National University (ANU) allocates 10 MB per person per day
- The University of Nebraska at Lincoln (UNL) allocates 500 MB per person per day
- The Oregon State University (OSU) allocates 1 GB per person per day
Tools for implementing and monitoring bandwidth quotas:
- Packeteer PacketShaper
- Squid Proxy can implement quotas for proxied traffic with delay pools or squish
- PaperCut can implement Internet quotas and charging
- Traffic Counter is a little software tool to help you track your own bandwidth usage, useful if you have a quota imposed on you
- Skyward IP Traffic Monitor "allows you to analyze direction and volume of Internet traffic in real time... helps you watch your network activity and see which connections take a lot of traffic. It works with Proxy Servers. Also, it saves daily logs and allows you to view the saved logs."
- SmoothWall has a traffic shaping module
- Sandvine offers hardware platforms targeted at internet service providers to implement traffic shaping policies.
