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> Chapter 24 - Traffic Shaping > Introduction

Introduction

With the ever-increasing demands on network systems for a number of protocols, including email, HTTP traffic both internally and externally to the internet, voice over IP, FTP, and more, slow traffic is becoming a reality. Important traffic may even be dropped or slowed to an unusable speed. Web traffic delays can result in a loss of revenue for businesses.

Traffic shaping attempts to normalize traffic peaks and bursts to prioritize certain flows over others. There is a physical limitation to the amount of data which can be buffered and to the length of time it can be buffered.

FortiGate units provide Quality of Service (QoS) by applying bandwidth limits and prioritization. Using traffic shaping, you can adjust how your FortiGate unit allocates resources to different traffic types to improve performance and stability of latency sensitive or bandwidth intensive network applications.

This chapter describes Quality of Service (QoS), traffic shaping, FortiGate traffic shaping algorithms, and includes configuration procedures for traffic shaping on FortiGate units.

This guide contains the following sections:

The purpose of traffic shaping describes traffic shaping theories and quality of service.

Traffic shaping methods lists different methods of applying traffic shaping within FortiOS, and explains how to use ToS and Differentiated Services.

Examples provides basic application scenarios for shapers.

Troubleshooting traffic shaping lists diagnose commands to use for determining if traffic shapers are working correctly.