Traffic shaping

Hi,

What is traffic shaping? can anyone tell me how it affects our internet and network security?

Traffic shaping is the act of messing with bits by your Internet provider. By design, the Internet works on a best effort mechanism. That means routers will accept packets from you and the other users of your ISP, and send them off to their destination. When the router gets overcrowded, it just refuses any more bits until there is room for them.

There are various types of shaping that can occur. The ISP can decide that some people should be privileged over others, that some ports should be blocked to prevent their bits from going through, or they can do packet inspection and block traffic depending on the type, say VoIP or file sharing.

The reason ISPs and backbone networks say they do traffic shaping is simply because they don't have enough bandwidth, because a minority of users are using too much of it.

Traffic shaping can be done in following way:

One way ISPs can throttle something like file sharing is by using the protocol itself. For example, a BitTorrent connection will open a link to a remote user, and then start sending packets with a specific header identifying it as a BitTorrent packet.

All the ISP has to do is detect these packets, then create a fake packet that says the connection has been reset and seems to be coming from the remote user, send it to your computer, and your file sharing connection will drop.

It's very hard to find out if your provider is doing traffic shaping. If you usually have a fast connection, and then you use an application and get poor results, it may be traffic shaping or it may just be normal congestion.

Traffic shaping also known as "packet shaping" is the control of computer network traffic in order to optimize or guarantee performance, lower latency, and/or increase usable bandwidth by delaying packets that meet certain criteria.

Traffic shaping provides a means to control the volume of traffic being sent into a network in a specified period, or the maximum rate at which the traffic is sent.
Traffic shaping is commonly applied at the network edges to control traffic entering the network, but can also be applied by the traffic source for example, computer or network card.