D-Link DFL-2500 User Guide - Page 268

23.2. Pipes 249 23.1.2 Features The traffic shaper in D-Link firewalls has the following key features: • Pipe based Traffic shaping in D-Link firewalls is handled by a concept based on "pipes", where each pipe has several prioritizing, limiting and grouping possibilities. Individual pipes may be chained in different ways to construct bandwidth management units that far exceed the capabilities of one single pipe. • Traffic prioritizing and bandwidth limiting Every pipe contains a number of priority levels, each with its own bandwidth limit, specified in kilobits per second. Limits may also be specified for the total of the pipe. • Grouping Traffic through a pipe can be automatically grouped into "pipe users", where each pipe user can be configured to the same extent as the main pipe. A group is specified with respect to a number of parameters, for instance, source or destination IP network, IP address or port number. • Dynamic bandwidth balancing The traffic shaper can be used to dynamically balance the bandwidth allocation of different pipe groups if the pipe as a whole has exceeded its limits. This means that available bandwidth is evenly balanced with respect to the grouping for the pipe. • Pipe chaining When pipes are assigned to pipe rules, up to eight pipes may be concatenated to form a chain. This permits filtering and limiting to be handled in a very sophisticated manner. • Traffic guarantees With the proper pipe configuration, the traffic shaping may be used to guarantee bandwidth (and thereby quality) for traffic through the firewall. A closer look into these features are given in the sections next. 23.2 Pipes A Pipe is a central concept in the traffic shaping functionality of D-Link firewalls and is the base for all bandwidth control. Pipes are fairly D-Link Firewalls User's Guide