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,[1] which would result in
network congestion and poor performance of the network. Bandwidth is described by
bit rate and measured in units of bits per second (bit/s) or bytes per second (B/s).[2]
Bandwidth management mechanisms and techniques
Bandwidth management mechanisms may be used to further engineer performance and includes:
Buffer tuning - [9] allows you to modify the way a router allocates buffers from its available memory, and helps prevent packet drops during a temporary burst of traffic.
Bandwidth reservation protocols / algorithms
Resource reservation protocol (RSVP) - is the means by which applications communicate their requirements to the network in an efficient and robust manner.[10]
Traffic classification - categorising traffic according to some policy in order that the above techniques can be applied to each class of traffic differently
Link performance
Issues which may limit the performance of a given link include:
TCP determines the capacity of a connection by flooding it until packets start being dropped (
slow start)
Queueing in routers results in higher
latency and
jitter as the network approaches (and occasionally exceeds) capacity