Frontdoor Firewall Appliance
Bandwidth Management
Quality of Service (QoS)
As the name implies, QoS refers the "quality" of network connections.
This is measured by two factors:
- Latency - The time it takes one packet to reach it's destination
- Throughput - A measure of traffic over a certain amount of time
In most environments, packets are transmitted using a First In First Out (FIFO)
scheme. This is acceptable when network usage is low enough, but becomes
very inefficient when the network link approaches saturation.
In order to improve network performance we need to categorize network traffic, and
assign service levels accordingly. For example, interactive applications
such as telnet and SSH require low latency but very little throughput, while data
transfer applications such as FTP do not depend on low latency only on high throughput.
Traffic can be classified by any combination of the following criteria:
- Source IP address
- Destination IP address
- Protocol
- Source port
- Destination port
- Source Interface
- Destination Interface
Traffic Shaping
Traffic shaping involves assigning these classifications several properties:
- Priority - High priority packets are dequeued first giving them the lowest latency
- Guaranteed Throughput - The minimum transfer rate to maintain
- Maximum Throughput - The maximum amount of bandwidth this type of traffic can consume
- Burst Rate - A temporary increase in the maximum bandwidth allowed in order to increase efficiency
Traffic Analysis
The Frontdoor's powerful web-based interface enables your network administrators to make
informed decisions regarding bandwidth usage. Intuitive graphs allow you to
view current and historical usage data for a wide variety of statistics.
Browsing Interface Usage
Connections by Protocol
Traffic by Application
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