Tuning network for performance

RouterOS General
1

Hi,

I’m using a Mikrotik RB750Gr3 and a UniFi AP for a show I’m building. My laptop is connected to the router via ethernet, and I’ve got 52 Androids tablets connected to the wifi network.
I’m sending OSC (UDP packets) to the tablets to cue audio and visual content.
It’s working well! But I’m keen to get some advice on how I can optimise the network further to get the best sync I can.

The network doesn’t have (or need) internet access. And the only communication between the laptop and the tablets are UDP packets on port 10001 and 10002.
I’ve experimented with broadcasting packets as well as unicasting to all of them. I didn’t have the best time with broadcast, it seemed to limit the number of packets I could send per second.

I have used mikrotik products a fair bit but consider myself pretty noobish when actually building configs. I haven’t done anything to this from the default router settings, other than give all the devices fixed IPs in the DHCP settings.

So I’m after any general advice please, and any recommendations about whether I should firewall all traffic other than what I need, or change any network parameters considering the usage I’m after. Thanks.

2

AFAIK Multicast (and broadcast) in wifi is only sent at the basic rate. (It may be the highest basic rate and not the lowest basic rate which is used for the AP beacons. Depends on MT implementation.)
However in most default settings the basic rate list set is very limited (just 1 Mbps for 802.11b, and 6 Mbps for the others like a,g,n,ac, as only value for the basic rates). Sometimes we carefully rise the lowest basic rate to reduce the beacon transmit time for each SSID in the channel. reducing that overhead leaves more time for the user data. But this might create connection problems. Here the adding of higher basic rates could help increase the rate for multicasts, without disabling the low basic rate where needed.

Mikrotiks “Multicast Helper” can also convert Multicast in Unicasts. (set per WLAN interface as wireless parameter).

Some more reading: https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-mcbride-mboned-wifi-mcast-problem-statement-01.html