Traffic shaping allows us to manage network traffic in a way that prioritizes some traffic over other traffic in order to conform to specific predefined constraints. These constraints are known as a traffic profile or agreement. For an example of such an agreement, consider looking at your contract with your ISP. Most likely, it contains a service level agreement (SLA), a traffic conditioning agreement (TCA), or both. These agreements define what traffic your ISP will accept. If packets are sent from your local network to the ISP that violate these agreements, the ISP may block them from being forwarded upstream, or, at the very least, forwarding may not be guaranteed. As a result, we generally want to make sure that traffic leaving our network is in compliance with these agreements. One of the ways we can do this is with a traffic shaper.

The traffic...