What is a characteristic of traffic shaping?

Dropping out-of-profile packets is characteristic of traffic policing, which immediately discards non-compliant traffic.

While traffic policing can cause TCP retransmits by dropping packets, traffic shaping aims to prevent drops by buffering, thus avoiding unnecessary retransmits.

While QoS mechanisms can often be applied in both traffic directions, the defining characteristic of traffic shaping is its buffering action, differentiating it from policing.

Traffic shaping buffers packets that exceed a configured rate limit and then transmits them at a compliant rate, rather than dropping them, effectively smoothing out the traffic flow until the buffer capacity is reached.