Resource Management

How Bandwidth Allocation Works

Bandwidth is allocated to a class of network traffic. The class of a packet is defined by some or all of the following factors:

• IP source address

• IP destination address

• IP protocol (TCP, UDP, or other)

• Source ports for TCP and UDP

• Destination ports for TCP and UDP

• Type of Service (ToS) value in the IP header

• URL or URL group

Class definitions are hierarchical and every class has a parent. For example, if you define a class for FTP traffic and a class for FTP traffic to a host called pear, the classes are connected in a hierarchy as shown in FIGURE 9-1.

Figure 9-1. Hierarchical Class Definitions

In this example, the ftp ...