Traffic shaping
Traffic shaping supports shaping the inbound traffic and the outbound traffic.
Traffic shaping limits the outbound traffic rate by buffering exceeding traffic. You can use traffic shaping to adapt the traffic output rate on a device to the input traffic rate of its connected device to avoid packet loss.
The difference between traffic policing and GTS is that packets to be dropped with traffic policing are retained in a buffer or queue with GTS, as shown in Figure 8. When enough tokens are in the token bucket, the buffered packets are sent at an even rate. Traffic shaping can result in additional delay and traffic policing does not.
Figure 8: GTS
For example, in Figure 9, Router B performs traffic policing on packets from Router A and drops packets exceeding the limit. To avoid packet loss, you can perform traffic shaping on the outgoing interface of Router A so packets exceeding the limit are cached in Router A. Once resources are released, traffic shaping takes out the cached packets and sends them out.
Figure 9: GTS application
