Bandwidth Management
By purposes, network traffic can be divided into multiple service types, such as the E-mail service and VoIP service. Bandwidth management refers to performing different management and control behaviors for different service types. Therefore, bandwidth management includes two major components: service and service-specific control behavior.
- A service can be system-defined or user-defined.
- The device determines the service type of a received packet by its application protocol and IP address, and then performs the corresponding action (block or rate-limit) for the packet according to the user-defined rule for the service.
- Additionally, you can configure per-segment bandwidth management policies so that you can more flexibly control the network traffic.
Quota Management
Quality of service is particularly important for the transport of traffic with special requirements. In particular, much technology has been developed to allow computer networks to become as useful as telephone networks for audio conversations, as well as supporting new applications with even stricter service demands.
Quality of service is the ability to provide different priority to different applications, users, or data flows, or to guarantee a certain level of performance to a data flow. Quality of service guarantees are important if the network capacity is insufficient, especially for real-time streaming multimedia applications such as voice over IP, online games and IP-TV, since these often require fixed bit rate and are delay sensitive, and in networks where the capacity is a limited resource, for example in cellular data communication.
WebRoam UTM enables IT administrators to divide their Internet bandwidth as desired. If the web server should be as responsive for customers as possible, the highest priority can be allocated to all applications.
WebRoam UTM's QoS system enables not only prioritization of network traffic and guaranteed performance, it can also provide this for users, groups and services. This is unique and ensures that each network user is provided with an appropriate amount of bandwidth.
Because most networks have a limited amount of bandwidth, you need an effective strategy to ensure the network does not become overloaded. WebRoam UTM's QoS system enables you to make the best use of the available bandwidth at any given time.
In Sonar, when prioritising traffic you can ensure that certain user groups or applications with a higher priority will always have high connection speeds. Traffic can be prioritised in different ways:
- Individual Zone, VLAN, IP, MAC.
- The Service of information being sent e.g. VPN, SMTP or FTP.
Certain traffic may be based on the type of information that is sent (for example, email or FTP), others based on the computer sending or receiving the information (such as a mail or web server), or based on the user sending the information. This is called traffic classification.
Once classified, traffic is placed in different queues. These queues have different properties, enabling more important traffic to pass through the network in a timely fashion.
A simple scenario would be to make sure that staff always have Internet access at the highest possible connection speeds, whereas students will only have moderate connection speeds.
Another option is to reduce QoS for users that have exceeded their quota. Rather than stopping them from accessing the Internet altogether, you can reduce their connection speeds (this is sometimes also referred to as traffic shaping).
You can also use QoS to guarantee sufficient network capacity for certain types of traffic. For example, by directing mail traffic to its own queue you can make sure that if someone sends out a bulk email to, say, 5,000 recipients this won't interfere with another user's voice over IP calls.
Quota Management
WebRoam UTM can significantly reduce Internet costs by controlling the amount of data available to individual users and/or groups of users and dynamically throttles Internet consumption as required. Quota can also be define, allocate, control and report on individual usage over defined reporting cycles.
- Quota management of data (GB), time
- Compliance reporting for monitoring usage
The QoS and Accounting options which is described earlier can be used to better utilize the available bandwidth. Which can be used on a WAN/Internet connection, but it can also be very useful for managing the traffic to a remote location or even between segments. The last option is download throttling. I think this option is very useful for limiting internet access. Especially on WiFi guest networks.
There are several ways to use QoS, one is to reserve bandwith for a protocol, this will reserve the bandwith (and not use it for anything else). Usefull for things like Voip, but remember, if you reserve too much, You're wasting bandwidth. Another option is to limit the traffic of a certain kind and/or direction. This limits certain kind of traffic so it never utilizes more bandwidth than what you configured. Also a great tool for limiting Facebook or streaming media traffic.
