ements. In reality, however, this practice may create all kinds of unexpected difficulties and suboptimal system behavior. In addition, the wheel does not have to be reinvented in terms of devising, coding, simu- lating, testing, validating, and optimizing algorithms that handle the various logical tasks associated with traffic management. Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. TRAFFIC MANAGERS 312 NETWORK PROCESSORS Traffic managers interface with network processors in a more or less standardized way; therefore, the time to market is accelerated for a systems architect since time is not wasted on unnecessary issues. By offloading the traffic management function from the network processor, finer traffic manage- ment granularity is enabled through the use of a specialized traffic manager chip, whereas signifi- cant amounts of silicon real estate remain available to the network-processor implementation for the materialization of an even higher-performance architecture for live packet classification and forwarding. Standalone chips are now required inside switching/routing equipment to enable service providers and carriers to provide QoS based on service level agreements (SLAs) to their major customers who insist on (and, more importantly, are ready to pay a premium for) having specific response times, bandwidth guarantees, and assured levels of availability for their network applications. In addition to the QoS-driven functionality that caters to the carrier customers' needs, traffic man- agers can also allow carriers to optimize their own operational finances by ensuring an optimal allo- cation of the available bandwidth as well as a graceful degradation of network performance in case of oversubscription (an undesirable situation, where more demand exists for bandwidth resources than is actually provided). Like security coprocessors,