Traffic shaping and Real time traffic - Tips

Don't assume that traffic shaping provided by many Residential and SMB gateways is enough for clear VOIP qulaity. It certainly improves the voice quality, but traffic shaping alone is not sufficient in many scenarios. Try downloading or uploading a file from popular sites in Internet, your voice quality suffers. Why is this? Hopefully this technical tip encourages the device vendors to start thinking towards providing better traffic management in their next firmware versions.

Introduction:
Many existing Residential and SMB gateways are based on SoCs (System On Chip). SoCs combine processor, Ethernet MACs, in some cases wireless MAC, Memory controller, Crypto accelerator and other peripheral buses into one single chip. These processor speed is in the tune of 400 to 500 MIPS. Recent generation of SoCs include gigabit MACs and DDR2 memory controller and also improving performance using fast path acceleration technologies. Though main processing speed has been going up, but not the extent of your Desktop PC processors. Many of these gateways typically drive upto 10Mbps links and hence it is thought this processing power is good enough to saturate bandwidth on WAN links. And it is fair assumption.

These gateways typically installed behind DSL/Cable/T1 modems via Ethernet. Though Ethernet speed is in terms of 100Mbps, but the actual speed of the WAN link is limited to few Mbps. Traffic shaping functionality of RG and SMB gateways actually consider effective bandwidth while shaping the outbound traffic. Within this bandwidth, these devices prioritize the outbound traffic based on multiple conditions. More often or not, it is based on TOS (Type of Service) field of IP header. Many devices also provide functionality and configuration to set the TOS value based on 5 tuple rules. This helps in cases where VOIP TA or VOIP phone behind the gateway does not set the higher values in TOS for voice traffic (RTP traffic) by providing option for administrator to set higher TOS value for the traffic coming from known phones and adapters. Many devices also support setting TOS values on RTP traffic dynamically.

Traffic shaping with this priority based scheduling works in many cases. But, it may not work in cases

• where CPU power is limited: Many routers are coming with 1Gbps ports on LAN side. If somebody pumps the traffic at very high rate, CPU is busy in processing these packets and they get dropped at the WAN link due to traffic shaping. Since CPU is busy, it might not process some real time traffic.
  
• where incoming bandwidth of WAN link is used up: Traffic shaping helps in shaping and scheduling outbound traffic, but it has no control over the packets coming from WAN link. If one of PCs locally is downloading a big file or movie, it might affect the VOIP traffic and you may not hear the remote party well.
  

That is why, it is very important to have Traffic policing in addition to Traffic shaping. Traffic policing functionality typically throttles the traffic at ingress side. Traffic policing can limit the bandwidth usage of incoming traffic and prioritize the traffic. The bandwidth of the traffic that needs to be allowed should depend on CPU power. This policing should happen as soon as packet enters into the system to save CPU cycles. On the WAN link too, traffic policing should be done to make the sender send the traffic little slowly. This may not work for non-TCP traffic, but again, majority of traffic is TCP, so it should work fine as a system.

For developers, I suggest to go with simple token bucket algorithm to detect and throttle traffic. Similar to traffic shaping, multiple rules can exists with each rule having set of throttling parameters, with each rule identifying the traffic by 5 tuple selectors and TOS values.