Bandwidth management enables many people to share an internet connection comfortably. Know more about how effective bandwidth management affects you as a consumer.

Bandwidth management refers to the process of controlling bandwidth to ensure enough of it is available to support internet traffic requirements. Internet service providers and information technology groups in big companies install a bandwidth manager functionality to perform this process. They monitor and control the inflow and outflow of data in the local area network in order to provide steady, predictable and consistent flow of traffic.

In the event that there is too much internet traffic and the bandwidth cannot handle such an influx, bandwidth management functionalities prioritize critical traffic and allow these to get through. They do this by barring unwanted frames so that they won't be processed by the access point. How do they know what frames are unwanted? By using ToS (type of service) byte in the IP packet, which identifies prioritization of traffic through a policy-based management. There are certain rules and regulations to follow when discriminatory allocation is necessary - these rules determine who or what gets bandwidth priority and when.

The aim of bandwidth management is to make sure that data is relayed to users with minimal or no delay and zero packet loss. Bandwidth management functionalities provide reports and display traffic onscreen real-time. It can either automatically reallocate bandwidth whenever necessary, or to alert a bandwidth manager on traffic problems. Bandwidth management functionalities have congestion control mechanisms that optimize the quality of internet speed and data fidelity. It also performs load balancing - it provides repetitive network links and/or network services that are designed to spread loads across repetitive links or systems. Load balancing functionalities relay packets to the least busy server or to the server most optimized to process the packet, making connections faster.

Articles Source - Free Articles
About the Author

Bandwidth provides detailed information on Bandwidth, Bandwidth Tests, Bandwidth Management, Bandwidth Meters and more. Bandwidth is affliated with Colocation Hosting.