Am having a really bad time with poor VOIP and Skype performance on our network.
I have an antenna purely dedicated to clients using our Trixbox server as on our other antennas (where the majority of the clients are) Voip and Skype are basically un-usable.
I have noticed many UPD connections open from our clients that use Bittorents. Could this be the problem? How can I limit these connections?
I have set up queues for VOIP and Skype traffic but this doesn’t seem to help.
We only have 55 clients in total and only 25 on the main antenna that is giving us the majority of the problems. Obviously they are not all on at the same time.
'torrent traffic does tend to lead to network issues, especially in regards to congestion and general router loads. The sheer number of connections generated by a single user can be considerable.
First I would limit the number of connections a single user can have. There’s not really any point trying to limit the speeds of the torrents since it will just push the user to encrypt their torrent traffic.
If a user complains, suggest they limit the number of connections in their torrent client software - most allow this value to be adjusted.
Also, have you tried de-prioritising all non-skype/voip traffic?
Instead of limiting only what causes the problem then perhaps you should consider doing the opposite?
Identify the traffic you want to give increased priority and then limit all traffic outbound on the AP interface to an upper limit (ceiling), then add a hierarchy of queues. Anything that doesn’t fall into the priority queue goes into the low priority queue. Permit the priority queue to lend to the low priority queue.
Because VoIP is something you know and can identify and isn’t something that is likely to be obfuscated.