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SonicOS 5.8.1 Administrator Guide
Using Bandwidth Management with Access Rules Overview
Bandwidth management (BWM) allows you to assign guaranteed and maximum bandwidth to
services and prioritize traffic on all BWM-enabled interfaces. Using access rules, BWM can be
applied on specific network traffic. Packets belonging to a bandwidth management enabled
policy will be queued in the corresponding priority queue before being sent on the bandwidth
management-enabled interface. All other packets will be queued in the default queue and will
be sent in a First In and First Out (FIFO) manner (a storage method that retrieves the item
stored for the longest time).
Example Scenario
If you create an access rule for outbound mail traffic (such as SMTP) and enable bandwidth
management with the following parameters:
• Guaranteed bandwidth of 20%
• Maximum bandwidth of 40%
• Priority of 0 (zero)
The outbound SMTP traffic is guaranteed 20% of available
bandwidth available to it and can
get as much as 40% of available bandwidth. If SMTP traffic is the only BWM enabled rule:
• When SMTP traffic is using its maximum configured bandwidth (which is the 40% maximum
described above), all other traffic gets the remaining 60% of bandwidth.
• When SMTP traffic is using less than its maximum configured bandwidth, all other traffic
gets between 60% and 100% of the link bandwidth.
Now consider adding the following BWM-enabled rule for FTP:
• Guaranteed bandwidth of 60%
• Maximum bandwidth of 70%
• Priority of 1
When configured along with the previous SMTP
rule, the traffic behaves as follows:
• 60% of total bandwidth is always reserved for FTP traffic (because of its guarantee). 20%
of total bandwidth is always reserved for SMTP traffic (because of its guarantee).
• SMTP traffic can use up to 40% of total bandwidth (because it has a higher priority than
FTP), which, when combined with FTP’s 60% guarantee, results in no other traffic being
sent, because all 100% of the bandwidth is being used by higher priority traffic.
• If SMTP traffic reduces and only uses 10% of total bandwidth, then FTP can use up to 70%
and all the other traffic gets the remaining 20%.
• If SMTP traffic stops, FTP gets 70% and all other traffic gets the remaining 30% of
bandwidth.
• If FTP traffic has stopped, SMTP gets 40% and all other traffic get the remaining 60% of
bandwidth.
Note When the Bandwidth Management Type on the Firewall Services > BWM page is set to
WAN: Access rules using bandwidth management have a higher priority than access rules
not using bandwidth management. Access rules without bandwidth management are given
lowest priority. When the Bandwidth Management Type is set to Global, the default priority
is Medium (4).