Editing Traffic shaping (section)

===Self-limiting sources===
A ''self-limiting source'' produces traffic which never exceeds some upper bound, for example media sources which cannot transmit faster than their encoded rate allows.<ref>{{citation |url=http://csr.bu.edu/icnp2005/Posters/Helzer.pdf |last1=Helzer |first1=Josh |first2=Lisong |last2=Xu |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090227044851/http://csr.bu.edu/icnp2005/Posters/Helzer.pdf |archive-date=2009-02-27 |date=2009-02-27 |title=Congestion Control for Multimedia Streaming with Self-Limiting Sources}}</ref> Self-limiting sources shape the traffic they generate to a greater or lesser degree. [[Congestion control]] mechanisms can also affect traffic shaping of sorts - for example [[Transmission Control Protocol|TCP's]] window mechanism implements a variable rate constraint related to [[bandwidth-delay product]].

TCP Nice, a modified version of TCP developed by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, allows applications to request that certain TCP connections be managed by the operating system as near zero-cost background transfers, or ''[[nice (Unix)|nice]]'' flows. Such flows interfere only minimally with foreground (non-nice) flows, while reaping a large fraction of spare network bandwidth.<ref>{{cite web | citeseerx = 10.1.1.81.5905 | title = TCP Nice: Self-tuning Network Support for Background Applications | first1 = Arun | last1 = Venkataramani | first2 = Ravi | last2 = Kokku | first3 = Mike | last3 = Dahlin | url = https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/844128.844159 |access-date = August 27, 2023}}</ref>