Quality of Service for selected clients

[rex_gimblett]

Hi All,

There a couple of laptops that I would like to "hog" wireless bandwidth, from two R310s Unleashed, to prevent buffering of streamed video media content. Is this possible (or desirable)?

Many thanks in advance,
gimbers

[john_d]

Wasn't heuristic QoS one of the features that SmartCast was supposed to provide at least back in the 7982 days? IIRC it automatically classified traffic into video, voice, background/best-effort queues and that way, a bulk download would probably be "background" while streaming video is "video", and it would ensure that video won't get starved out by downloads....

As far as I can tell, heuristic QoS seems to be disabled on 11ac 5Ghz radios and the commands to enable it don't seem to do anything at the CLI. On my 7982, I can see nonzero incrementing counters in "get qos ", but that doesn't seem to happen on R600/700/710.



But I think for the OP, if the bottleneck is at the WAN, it's much better to use a gateway firewall/router to perform QoS (traffic shaping, in your case), because it is the point that has full visibility, while each AP only knows about its own traffic.

[rex_gimblett]

John,

Quick question on this. So I've set up some QoS in the DrayTek 2860 router. Still getting some buffering on video. This is probably a stupid question, but in QoS scheme like this (on an IP address range) who is taking the bandwidth? The IP address of the laptop connected to the access point, or the IP address of the access point itself? Or both? Laptop is on 10.10.10.15 and in Class 1 (75%) of the QoS banding. Access Point is on 10.10.10.50 and in the Class 2 (19%) of the QoS bands. The Class 3 band is 5% and everyone not mentioned above gets 1%. Not sure who should be getting most of the bandwidth? The laptop connected to the wireless access point? The wireless access point itself? Or both?

Many thanks in advance,
timbers 

[john_d]

You don't want to apply QoS to the access point's IP unless the access point is configured in NAT mode for a private subnet.

You almost certainly want the laptop's IP in your current bridged config, because the AP itself uses almost no bandwidth (just pinging a Ruckus server occasionally and syncing its time)

[rex_gimblett]

Chris & John, thank you. You guys are amazing. Thanks for the input in such a clear and concise way. This is all making much more sense now...

I'm coming at this from AV, not IT, so still feeling my way.

Did a walk through of a four storey property today with two R310s, streaming HD content, and the handoff from AP to AP was seamless. Just need to add another AP on the top floor to totally nail it.

Unleashed seems to be working well.
gimbers

[john_d]

Glad we can help. The last 3-4 years, I've been walking that fine line between a consumer vs enterprise home network as well. I've found, like you've presumably found, it to be a really challenging area, because it is a pretty fledgling market, and I think a lot of the good solutions tend to be priced way out of consumer reach.

I'm really glad Ruckus introduced Unleashed as well as the value-proposition AP's like the R310, R500, and R600. That combination has made it a lot easier to propose a Ruckus AP based wifi solution that's within a pro-sumer's budget.

Unfortunately I found that the gateway was a harder solution to get right for the home market. Officially, the Ruckus position per their support KB is that they don't recommend any particular routers/gateways/firewalls. Hopefully it is alright for me to give some advice for a pro-sumer gateway recommendation.... But I'll preface this by saying I'm not affiliated with any of these vendors, this is just by my personal experience of trying out 10+ network topologies at home:


 - The most cost effective is to load DD-WRT or AdvancedTomato onto a powerful consumer router. Disable its wifi — it's junk compared to Ruckus :D. But it will give you a lot of QoS settings at an affordable price. I personally found AdvancedTomato's to be more functional than DD-WRT's, though honestly, both have very clunky UI's and can be finicky.
 - Running Sophos UTM Home Edition on a computer with two NICs is a reasonable solution too. Its QOS settings I think are a little lacking, but it gives you a lot of great features, like fairly accurate Layer-7 identification so you can make rules based off broad categories like "video streaming" without spending a day googling IP address and port ranges for Netflix, etc. There's a great bang for the buck here — there's zero licensing costs. Most UTMs with this level of functionality charge on the order of a hundred dollars a year or more for subscriptions.
 - Cisco Meraki's MX gateways are my favorite for these kinds of basic home / small-branch networks. Now, they are a Ruckus competitor in that they also have a line of wireless AP's, but honestly, I have found their AP's pale in comparison to Ruckus, and you can find a lot of testing (such as the recent CARNet tests) to back up this claim. However, with that said, their gateways have really easy-to-configure traffic shaping (you can simply put categories of applications as High, Medium, or Low priority, and set the speed of the WAN link, and everything just works automagically). However, they have some pretty hefty licensing fees on a per-year basis, and the equipment simply shuts off if you stop paying the fees....

Those are just some ideas in case you find yourself needing gateway-level features to complement your Ruckus Unleashed network. I'm sure there's other great choices too, but the above are the solutions that I've had personal experience and would be willing to recommend.