Control Internet Radio Traffic

Instructions for constraining Internet radio traffic

Many employees who are simultaneously listening to Internet radio throughout the business day consume corporate bandwidth and can disrupt your network.

Steps:

The following steps help you to identify and contain this potentially disruptive traffic.

1. Identify and differentiate Internet radio traffic.
   
   Enable traffic discovery. PacketWise automatically identifies SHOUTcast, Radio@Netscape, and Windows Media.
   
   To see if employees are using these applications on your network, go to the Monitor Traffic page and look for Shoutcast, RadioNetscape, and WinMedia traffic classes. If you don’t see these classes, either auto-discovery isn't enabled or the applications aren't being used on your network; in either case, you can create the classes manually. Make sure you have traffic classes for your radio traffic in both the Inbound and Outbound branches of the traffic tree.
   
   
2. Create a folder class for your Internet radio traffic and move the radio traffic classes into this folder. Be sure to create the Radio folder in both the Inbound and Outbound branches.
   
   
3. Apply partitions to the Inbound/Radio and Outbound/Radio folders. If your primary concern is protecting business-related, non-recreational applications, you can specify a minimum size of zero (0 Kbps). The Limit should be the portion of the WAN link you are willing to devote to Internet radio.
   
   The size of your partitions depends on how restrictive you want to be and the relative importance of other traffic. See Sizing a Static Partition for assistance.
   
   For background information, see Partition Overview.
   
   
4. Set a rate policy on each radio traffic class to reduce jitter.

In addition, you should determine the strategy you’d like to follow if more users want access to Internet radio than your partitions, policies, and link size can accommodate. Would you like to reject latecomers during busy times? Or would you like to squeeze them in with a tiny amount of bandwidth and just string them along until more becomes available? You can use Packeteer’s admission control mechanism to define what happens when there isn't enough bandwidth to satisfy guaranteed rate requests.