Rate Shaping and Port Shaping Overview

Rate shaping throttles the rate at which queues transmit packets. Rate shaping is TCP friendly; that is, it buffers packets that are above the rate, rather than dropping them.

Port shaping enables you to shape the aggregate traffic through a port or channel to a rate that is less than the line or port rate. With port shaping, you can configure scheduler nodes at the port level, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Port Shaping on an Ethernet Module