Wi-Fi access point/router optimization for VoIP and other real time apps

In order to improve the bandwidth allocation for certain apps in your wireless network you need to enable QoS (quality of service) feature on your router/access point. Please make sure that you have enough bandwidth available (down and up) on your Internet link.

If the quality of your VoIP calls or Skype calls/video start breaking up, or your favorite on-line radio stream gets clogged whenever your wife/child  starts download new movie using BitTorrent ( P2P) or playing World of Warcraft, you may improve the performance without adding more bandwidth (higher service package). Most LAN and Wi-Fi routers sold in the past few years have a quality-of-service (QoS) feature.

As an example I will use Linksys router as I have WRT54GL at home, but other models or vendors will have pretty much the same fields that we will need to setup. My Linksys  has a QoS tab in  ”Applications and Gaming”. First of all please make sure that  WMM support feature is enabled.

Then enable Internet Access Priority for applications you want to be prioritized – select each application from drop-down menu and choose High, Medium, Normal or Low priorityand then click “Add” button. You may want to give BitTorrent and other download services a low priority and give your VoIP service a high priority. Please see below screen prints from my router setup interface.

Please note that with Linksys you can setup  priority for specific voice devices, such as VoIP phones that connect directly to your network. Not all routers can prioritize particular applications or devices by traffic types/IP’s/port ranges, but even if you don’t have extended settings on your device you should try to enable QoS or WMM and that may help to optimize a real time traffic in your network.

You are welcome to see another articles for setting up QoS for ip telephony traffic on Linux as well as interesting dilemma with QoS in IP-based networks.

Hope it will helps someone. Please don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions you may have.