Hi Guys,
Here is a question that is probably of concern to many of us.
I am under pressure to provide some solution for ingress traffic shaping. What my customer demands is to divide the downstream (ingress) of an ADSL lines to two classes of traffic - important traffic and non important downloads. He has a very reasonable requirement: he wants a guarantee of at least 1000kbps at all times for the important traffic on the downstream.
Using ingress policing would be the trivial solution. But no says the customer - when the important traffic is not fully utilizing its rate, I want it to share the excess with other classes.
After looking around, the answer I found was to use imq, which claims to allow traffic shaping on ingress traffic. So far so good.
And now I arrive to the question: It is possible to configure everything in THEORY. The question is, it it really possible for me to give the guarantee that my customer is asking for? I can think of examples why it seems that the answer is no. For example, lets say the ingress line is completely saturated with non-important traffic. How on earth can the poor HTB determine whether important traffic is being drowned out - or there is simply no important traffic?
My speculation so far - it is possible to configure these rules, and indeed this is what IMQ was invented for, but in true life there is no solution that works - since it is inherently impossible!
Has anyone really created and tested a working ingress traffic shaping solution?
Aron
