Traffic shaping is an attempt to control computer network traffic in order to optimize or guarantee performance, low latency, and/or bandwidth. Traffic shaping deals with concepts of classification, queue disciplines, enforcing policies, congestion management, quality of service (QoS), and fairness.

Traffic shaping provides a mechanism to control the volume of traffic being sent into a network (bandwidth throttling), and the rate at which the traffic is being sent (rate limiting). For this reason, traffic shaping schemes need to be implemented at the network edges to control the traffic entering the network. It also may be necessary to identify traffic flows at the ingress point (the point at which traffic enters the network) with a granularity that allows the traffic-shaping control mechanism to separate traffic into individual flows and shape them differently
Source: wikipedia

Fortinet Inc. - Manufacturers of the FortiGate series of ASIC-accelerated firewalls including VPN, anti-virus, content filtering, intrusion detection and traffic shaping.

TSE Traffic Shaping Engine - Manufacturers of the FortiGate series of ASIC-accelerated firewalls including VPN, anti-virus, content filtering, intrusion detection and traffic shaping.

Bandwidth Controller - Bandwidth management, and traffic shaping software for Windows 2000 and XP, runs on the server with no client software needed.

Allot NetEnforcer - Fault tolerant traffic shaping, bandwidth monitoring and reporting, and service level management for IP networks. Includes a tool that automatically discovers network protocols and creates a QoS policy.

GuardianBox - Transparent filter appliance with the integration of anti-virus, firewall, anti-spam, filters, content filtering, traffic shaping and web-cache.

AdventNet - WAN monitoring, LAN monitoring, network, systems and applications management solutions.

InJoy Firewall - The InJoy Firewall's Traffic Shaping feature offers a solution to the problems mentioned above, by providing easy-to-use bandwidth management and traffic prioritizing capabilities.


  


Articles and how to's

Traffic Shaping [more] (article) - Traffic shaping is the general term given to a broad range of techniques designed to enforce prioritization policies on the transmission of data over a network link. In this month's column, we'll look at some of the IP traffic shaping tools available for Linux and a simple example of how to use them.

Linux Traffic Shaping with HTB

HTB Linux queuing discipline manual

Bandwidth Control

Traffic Shaping - Traffic Shaping/Control with HTB examples

Example of a full nat solution with QoS