A technique for managing a customer's traffic in a network node, such as a
service provider edge device, involves dedicating a group of queues in
the network node to the customer, performing queue-specific rate shaping
on the customer's traffic according to queue-specific bandwidth
limitations, and performing group-specific rate shaping on the customer's
traffic as a whole according to a group-specific bandwidth limitation. In
an embodiment, the queues in the group are associated with different
types of customer traffic in order to provide type-specific rate shaping.
Further, the queues may be prioritized among each other such that unused
excess bandwidth is distributed among the different traffic types in
priority order.