Airtime Fairness

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Various access point vendors have started to enable the “Airtime Fairness” feature on their accesspoints that works with regular 802.11

The idea is that if there’s multiple clients competing for airtime, the amount of traffic a client will be allowed to send (or that will be sent to the client) will be proportional to the rate at which it is connected – e.g. on a 40MHz AP, someone with an 802.11ac 2x2 device one a will get 433 shares of time, where as someone with a 802.11n 1x1 device will get 150 shares of time… and if the person with a slower device was far away, it would get even less time.


Is there anything you can do on a Mikrotik instead to make better use of the spectrum in situations where something like this might be useful, e.g. hotels and conferences.

2

There isn’t really anything close to it, we’ll have to wait for MT to implement it. The best you can do for now is disable 802.11b and bump your minimum data rates for G up.

3

Or… can you use a PCQ queue and set the rate just below the maximum rate of the AP wireless capability also use lower HW retries to limit poor signal hogs?

I know it’s not quite the same as airtime fairness would probably work in the actual radio but I have not looked up the details and maybe the end result would be similar? The problem I guess is that it’s hard to be sure of the airspeed with unlicensed wireless?