Nonlinear traffic shaper with automatically adjustable cost parameters

A traffic shaping circuit regulates packets transferred by a transmission resource into a network (e.g., a network on a chip) on behalf of a client. The packet transfers are selectively enabled or disabled based on a current budget value. The budget value is modified based on a packet-transfer cost in response to transferring a packet into the network. The rate of packet transfers into the network is monitored. A cost-adjustment signal is generated based on the rate of packet transfers. The packet-transfer cost is modified in response to the cost-adjustment signal for accounting for a subsequent-packet transfer into the network. The cost-adjustment signal may indicate an increase or decrease of the packet-transfer cost and/or a budget limit, both of which are read from a cost table comprising records ordered based on respective packet-transfer cost values. The packet-transfer cost and/or a budget limit are configurable.