I am trying to use the packet packing protocal (M3P) to decrease the load on a router that is being hit with a lot of small packets. The size of these packets is around 50-100 bytes. I have been able to get M3P working over a wired link using 3 routers, one on each end acting as a router and the router in the middle with 2 of it’s ports bridged together. With M3P running on the 2 routers ether1 interfaces and using the packet sniffer on the middle router the packets are packing properly.
The configuration that I am having issues with is using 5 routers. One router, test-bridge has 2 other routers hanging off it on 2 of it’s ethernet ports, test1 and test 2. Test1 and test 2 are each on their own subnet. There is a routed connection between the routers and there is connectivity between them. I then created an eoip tunnel between the test1 and test2 and on each router bridge the eoip tunnel with ether2. There is no ip on the bridge or ether2 the only ip is on ether1. I then hookup 2 more routers test12 and test22 on ether2 of each router. Test12 and test22 each have an ip address in the same subnet on their ether1 port. I am running M3P on the eoip tunnel interfaces on each router. I checked the packets with the packet sniffer on test-bridge and the packets were not being compressed.
To test simulate the small packets I am using the bandwidth tester that are 50 bytes in size and the bandwidth is set to 1024k. The routers I am using are all RB532s running with 2.9.46 RouterOS. I am verifying the packing by using the packet sniffer tool on the test-bridge router. The packets are not being packed in the 5 router configuration that I am using but it seems to work in the 3 router configuration that I am using.
The 2.9 documentation doesn’t mention if M3P only works with layer 3 or if it can work with just layer 2. I suspect that M3P only works in a routed configuration based on my testing but have been unable to find any documentation or other information to back this up. If the configuration is correct does anyone have any suggestions on what the M3P is not packing the packets? Also is there a better way to simulate the small packets on the router besides using the bandwidth test because I am concerned that turning up the bandwidth any higher with put too much a load on the CPU and skew the results of the test.