An engineer must redesign the QoS strategy for Company XYZ. The current network is experiencing many dropped packets due to oversubscription of the guaranteed bandwidth allocated by the service…

Policing enforces a rate limit by dropping or re-marking packets that exceed the configured rate, which would increase packet drops rather than minimize them.

Traffic shaping buffers packets that exceed the committed information rate (CIR) and queues them for transmission when bandwidth becomes available, rather than dropping them immediately. This smoothing behavior directly addresses the problem of oversubscription by metering outgoing traffic to match the service provider's guaranteed rate, which reduces packet drops at the provider's policing point.

Rate-limiting is conceptually equivalent to policing in this context - it enforces a hard cap by discarding excess traffic rather than buffering and smoothing it.

Low Latency Queuing (LLQ) prioritizes real-time traffic such as voice within the existing bandwidth but does not smooth or buffer traffic to conform to an external rate limit, so it does not prevent oversubscription-related drops.