Administrative Services | - Information Technology Services - | Financial Aid | University Communications | Student Affairs

ITS Policies

Packet Shaping Policy

What is shaping?

Here at Denison "Packet Shaping" is viewed as the action of prioritizing and regulating network traffic in real-time with the goal of protecting internet traffic that is related to the academic mission of the University.  A secondary goal is to enable equitable sharing of resources not actively being used for academic purposes.  To accomplish these goals, Denison uses a device called a "Packeteer" to prioritize traffic.

Why do we need to shape traffic?

The cost of bandwidth for Internet connectivity can be expensive.  Currently Denison has 60Mbps of bandwidth available to the internet for the Denison community to use.  When this amount of bandwidth is spread across nearly 3,000 people is easy to see how members of the community would begin to compete for internet bandwidth.  When large files like movie and music downloads and streaming are thrown into the mix sharing bandwidth becomes a delicate balancing act.

To make it even more difficult of a challenge, a number of popular applications like Kazaa, BitTorrent, and other "peer-to-peer" file sharing applications intentionally try to capitalize on all available bandwidth the system the software is running on has at its fingertips.  If our internet traffic was not shaped to ensure equitable use a very small number of systems could easily clog our internet connection making it unusable.

What is Denison’s policy and philosophy on shaping?

 

As of the Fall Semester of 2006 Denison has embraced a "per-user" philosophy as opposed to a "service-type" philosophy.  Denison has organized packet shaping in the following fashion.  Denison organizes clients into major categories including: dorms, staff (which includes administrative and academic), labs, servers, video conferencing, and Akamai.  These large categories are allotted a total amount of bandwidth that can be used by all users within that group combined.  Within each of these groups users are only permitted to use up to a predefined amount of bandwidth.  Currently users can individually use a maximum of 5Mbps.

What does Denison’s shaping rule-set look like?

We have the following highlights which will help you understand how packet shaping at Denison works:

  • We split all traffic into categories. The categories that we use are: Labs, Dorms, Staff/Faculty, Servers, and Academic
  • Video Conferencing Labs are guaranteed 5% of our total internet bandwidth and are allowed to use up to 30%
  • Dorms are guaranteed 40% of our total internet bandwidth and are allowed to use up to 75%
  • Staff and Faculty are guaranteed 17% of our total internet bandwidth and are allowed to use up to 75%
  • Servers are guaranteed 15% of our total internet bandwidth and are allowed to use up to 100%
  • Video conferencing is set up so each flow from Denison to other schools will be given 4Mb of bandwidth

Does packet shaping require Denison to view the content of someones traffic?

No.  The packetshaper does not view the contents of packets sent or received by any system on the network.  The packetshaper uses switching, routing, and packet header information to determine how to correctly shape the traffic going through it.  The content of internet packets remains private during the shaping process.