Study of IP Traffic Shaping Instrument

BME Távközlési és Telematikai Taszék

The traffic shaping is essential to providing guaranteed services. The ATM forum defined the traffic shaping as a function of the traffic management. Most of the implementations are created on ATM switches. Today only a small proportion of the IP instruments have this function, but the need is increasing very fast.

The two tested machines are special routers that have ATM interface. They can shape the traffic that goes trough this ATM interface. One of the providers make an ATM switch suitable for handling IP packet. Great benefit of the solution is that all of the services (like traffic scheduling or special possibilities inside the UBR traffic class) developed through long time are working well in the new machines. However the performance results are poor, because the processor cannot achieve the surplus jobs. There is no performance problem with the other solution that was developed from scratch by a startup company but here lot of functions are missing. For instance the traffic scheduling that make a difference between traffic classes do not work at all.