Traffic prioritisation (aka traffic shaping) is a technology that enables you to tell your network to let one form of traffic have precedence over another.
Traffic shaping and other technical measures should only be employed as a last resort, and in such cases consumers should be advised in advance of the application of these measures.
Traffic sources which are aware of a traffic contract may apply traffic shaping to ensure their output stays within the contract and is thus not discarded.
Traffic policing and traffic shaping are commonly used to protect the network against excess or excessively bursty traffic, see bandwidth management and congestion avoidance.
They sometimes use traffic shaping to optimize the use of their network, sometimes by intelligently shaping traffic according to importance, other times by discouraging uses of applications by harsh means.
Traffic shaping is used to optimize or guarantee performance, improve latency, and/or increase usable bandwidth for some kinds of packets by delaying other kinds.
