Bandwidth Management
A process of measurement and control of communication that may be traffic, packets on a network link refers to Bandwidth Management. This is carried out with the objective of avoiding filling the link to capacity or overfilling the link that might result in poor performance of the link.
Bandwidth Optimization is one of the concerns that webmasters deal with. They deal with them while hosting web content. As most of the web hosts charge based on the bandwidth used, a webmaster will compress the files without changing the content and the integrity. Currently, most of the web hosts offer unlimited bandwidth. A reduction in the bandwidth usage is measured in negabytes, negawatts, negameters and negagrams.
Traffic Shaping
This is also known as ‘packet shaping’ and is the control of computer network traffic to optimize performance, increase latency or alter the bandwidth by delaying packets. This is a means to take charge of the volume of traffic sent to a network in a specified period or a rate of traffic transportation.
Quality of Service (QoS)
In the field of telecommunications and computer networking, the traffic engineering term – quality of service refers to the resource reservation control. It is the ability to offer different priority to different applications, users or data flows to guarantee a certain level of performance to flow of data.
Quality of Service assurances are essential in case the network capacity is not sufficient, specially for streaming multimedia applications like voice over IP, online games and IP-TV as these need a fixed bit rate and are sensitive to delays, as well as in networks where there is a limited resource capacity as in the case of cellular communication.
Load Balancing in Telecommunications (VoIP)
Load balancing is useful in handling redundant communication links. A company may have multiple Internet connections that ensure network access although one of the connections fails.
In a failover display, one link is designated for a normal use while the other link is used as a backup in case the first link fails. However, with load balancing, both the links can be used at all times. A program finalizes on which of the links to send the packets and also be careful not to send the packets along any link, if in case it has failed, at the same time. The potential to use multiple links also increases the bandwidth.
Large telecommunications companies possess multiple routes through their networks or to their external networks. They make use of more refined load balancing and shift the traffic to avoid any network congestion. They also minimize the cost of transit over external networks.
According to TMCNet, in 2009, with VoIP continued to show steep growth and the SaaS market forecast to grow by 22% and companies are still depending on IP based technologies for their communications. IP in the form on VoIP works out to be more reasonably priced than traditional telephony with its more costly T1 and T3 lines.
Apart from this, Internet-driven connection that is provided by wire line, satellite, cable and wireless ISPs offer flexibility.
Many small and medium business use IP based technology for sorting out the disaster recovery plans. This is done based on the belief that there is always the choice of allowing people to go home to work if the company faces communications outage.
