QoS: Optimize Your Wi-Fi Network

QoS: Optimize Your Wi-Fi Network                                                                 

                                                   For SOHO Routers

 

Have you ever been frustrated by network latency when gaming? Have you ever been annoyed seeing your streaming video skip or buffer? Maybe you need QoS to help optimize your Wi-Fi network.

 

What is QoS?

QoS stands for Quality of Service. Just as the name suggests, it is a mechanism to ensure the quality of network. The measurement of QoS concerns several technical indicators, such as bandwidth, packet loss, errors, latency, and jitter (latency variance that may seriously affect the quality of streaming video and voice). What QoS does is ensure enough bandwidth of critical network traffic under limited network capacity.

 

Why Do We Need QoS?

Without QoS, the internet works like a “best-effort” system that tries its best to handle all of the data and treats it all equally. The more and more diversified services today increase the risk of traffic congestion on the internet. With undifferentiated treatment, non-important applications might gobble up too much bandwidth while important ones are starved of bandwidth.

QoS rises to tackle the challenge. The core of QoS is assigning different priorities to different applications and handling each accordingly. Real-time and important data packets are handled first and guaranteed certain amount of bandwidth. With QoS, you can ensure that your laptop or movie stream is first in line for network.

 

 

 

 

How Does QoS Work?

The most widely used service model of QoS is Differentiated-Service (abbreviated as Diff-Serv), which provides differentiated processing and bandwidth allocation to specific data flows. Then how does it work specifically? The two most important steps for Diff-Serv model are classifying and marking, and queuing.

 

1. Classifying and Marking

Packets are classified and marked with tags so that the router can identify their respective priority levels. This is the precondition for differentiated service. Just like express delivery, packages tagged with “urgency” are sent first in the fastest way.

2. Queuing

Based on their classification, these packets are put into different queues according to certain rules, waiting to be processed. They are assigned with specific priorities and bandwidth according to the classification. This ensures bandwidth is divvied up appropriately. For example, data with the highest priority (such as gaming) is sent first and guaranteed at least 60% of bandwidth.

 

Note: The quality of a certain type of service is guaranteed at the expense of other (less important) services since the total bandwidth is limited. It boosts performance of high-priority applications and devices when needed. Data of lower priorities won’t be affected when the network is not busy.

 

When is QoS Useful to You?

The quality of networks is influenced by a range of factors and QoS only targets some of them. It helps to know what restricts your network most. Here are some tips.

 

1. If your slow network is caused by total bandwidth you get from your ISP, then QoS might not help too much. You can’t expect a 20         Mbps network to have the effect of a 100 Mbps network.

2. QoS is most useful for outbound traffic, that is, traffic going from your LAN to the internet.

3. If there are many network activities or heavy users within your LAN, QoS is very useful in reallocating bandwidth resources as you see fit and boosting performance of critical applications and devices.

 

 

The HomecareTM QoS of a TP-Link Router

QoS is one of the three functions of HomecareTM. It features Application Priorities and Device Priority.

 

Application Priority:

You can optimize your network by assigning priority (High, Normal & Low) for favorite activities like gaming, streaming, chatting and surfing. For example, you can set high and low priorities for chatting and gaming respectively so that you have a stutter-free Skype conference call while your kids are playing Xbox.

 

Device Priority:

Device priority allows you to prioritize a specific device from the list of devices accessed to the internet for a certain period. For example, you can set your work laptop to always be the most prioritized so that it isn’t sluggish when contending for bandwidth with other devices.

 

How to Configure QoS?

QoS is helpful in improving performance of important traffic. Want to know how to set up QoS on a TP-Link router? You can refer to FAQ “Using Homecare QoS Features in a TP-Link Router” via https://www.tp-link.com/us/faq-1708.html.

 

Overall, QoS allows you to assign bandwidth to devices and applications when needed. If there are a host of services competing for bandwidth within your LAN, QoS will be of great help to you.