Bandwidth management is a process in which the entire bandwidth is distributed among multiple elements of the network on priority basis. While managing the bandwidth, administrators can allocate the minimum and maximum amount of bandwidth for:
- Service – While allocating bandwidth for a service, administrators can specify the minimum and maximum amount of bandwidth that particular service is allowed to consume while accessing the network (local area network or Internet).
- Protocol – When bandwidth is located on protocol basis, the traffic related to that port is allowed to consume only the allocated amount of network bandwidth. Limiting bandwidth consumption on protocol basis remarkably reduces the consumption, which further allows other important bandwidth intensive applications and/or services to run smoothly.
- Application – Administrators can also allocate the minimum and maximum amount of bandwidth an application can consume while communicating with the network. Allocating bandwidth for applications is mostly done in the organizations that use third-party applications to synchronize and store database from different remote branches to one central datacenter.
- User – In order to allocate bandwidth on user level, user authentication is required. Once authenticated, the user is allowed to consume the allocated amount of bandwidth while communicating with the network (LAN/Internet). This prevents users from consuming additional bandwidth unnecessarily.
- Port – While allocating the bandwidth, administrators can allocate the amount of bandwidth consumption on per port basis. This allows administrators to control the bandwidth consumption by restricting a node connected to network from eating up the bandwidth uselessly.
- Source/Destination IP Addresses – Administrators can also allocate minimum and maximum amount of bandwidth that a node is allowed to consume on the source or destination IP addresses. This can be configured to restrict incoming or outgoing packets from or to a specific bandwidth intensive node.
- VPN – Administrators can manage and allocate the minimum and maximum amount of bandwidth while dealing with VPN traffic. However administrators cannot allocate separate amount of bandwidth is for each VPN connection, and can only allocate universal bandwidth consumption for the entire VPN traffic.
In a complex network setup, where there are multiple computers and several users who use bandwidth consuming applications, services, etc., administrators should allocate the amount of bandwidth as per the usage. This means that the applications or services that play an important role in organization’s business should be set to high priority and higher amount of bandwidth should be allocated to them. Likewise, the applications, services or protocols that are at second level of priority should be allocated with lesser amount of bandwidth. This variation in bandwidth allocation prevents users, applications and/or protocols from consuming more than required bandwidth, and allows important elements to utilize the bandwidth optimally in order to provide an efficient workflow of the network, hence giving better output to the business.
Some bandwidth management devices also allow administrators to distribute the bandwidth in an efficient manner. The efficiency of the bandwidth is assessed when an application or end-user receives more than the minimum committed bandwidth. For example, if a user has been committed for minimum and maximum 512 Mbps and 1024 Mbps of bandwidth respectively, the user gets 512+ Mbps continuously. This is automatically managed by the bandwidth management device in a way that if the entire bandwidth is distributed among 10 users with the commitment that each would get the minimum bandwidth of 512 Mbps and the maximum of 1024 Mbps, if 2 out of 10 users do not consume the bandwidth at a particular time, the unconsumed bandwidth is distributed among other users on a priority basis. In such scenarios, the remaining 8 out of 10 users get more than 512 Mbps bandwidth during the time the two users are not consuming the bandwidth.
An Example of Bandwidth Allocation
A good example of bandwidth management can be found while subscribing for an Internet broadband connection. ISPs offer several plans in which they commit subscribers for minimum and maximum bandwidth that would be available to them. Whichever plan a subscriber chooses, the ISP allocates the bandwidth as per the selected plan.