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Fundamentally, Quality of Service (QoS) won't make your internet connection faster or increase the overall bandwidth. Instead, it makes specific services and applications feel faster when the network is congested. This is a feature on your wifi router that you should be aware of to enhance the quality of your internet connection. Configuring Quality of Service (QoS) for better online gaming and video streaming is a worthwhile endeavor for those seeking high-quality entertainment.
What is Quality of Service (QoS)?
Quality of Service (QoS) is a mechanism used to ensure that prioritized traffic takes the lead and allocates bandwidth to other multimedia applications. QoS is employed to control access traffic on the Internet network system.
Imagine your network system as a highway between your devices and the Internet. Quality of Service divides this highway into lanes for cars and emergency vehicles, allowing only certain types of traffic to move in specific lanes, and some lanes move slower.
Certainly, each direction on the highway will have a maximum number of lanes, so it won't increase the number of cars in the car lane. Quality of Service (QoS) only makes some access traffic smoother.
Similarly, Quality of Service won't make your Internet connection faster or increase the overall bandwidth; it simply makes you feel that certain services and applications are faster when the network is congested.
Voice over IP (VoIP) and video calling services like Skype or Facetime are sensitive to both latency and bandwidth. Enhance these services by configuring appropriate QoS settings.
Understanding Latency and Bandwidth
Latency measures the delay in communication between you and another user chatting over the network. A classic example of latency is when you make a call to another user; there is a certain delay between your speech and theirs.
Bandwidth is the rate at which you can download or upload data, often limited by the Internet connection speed. Generally, communication apps are more 'responsive' to latency or bandwidth.
Games are extremely sensitive to latency but not as much to bandwidth. If you've never tried playing a game with high latency, such as experiencing lag during online gaming, it takes a lot of time for everything to react or move.
Video streaming is highly sensitive to bandwidth but less sensitive to latency. Each video has a bitrate, the amount of data it transmits in a given time, usually measured in bits per second. Higher resolution results in a larger bitrate. If the available bandwidth is less than the required bitrate, the video will pause buffering when the downloaded data runs out.
These are the services that Quality of Service prioritizes. Lower priority is reserved for access traffic like BitTorrent downloads, typically not time-sensitive, while other services like web browsers tend to fall in the mid-priority range.
How does Quality of Service work?
Services disrupted by latency and low bandwidth can have improved performance with Quality of Service by reducing latency or freeing up bandwidth. Both reducing latency and freeing up bandwidth aim to enhance overall network performance.
Different types of access traffic will have different mechanisms, depending on whether that traffic is sensitive to latency or bandwidth.
Queue (Latency)
Queuing is the primary mechanism used to reduce latency for specially prioritized access traffic. Queuing allows the router to hold access traffic when it is not ready to process it.
Quality of Service rules can allow packets (network data packets) from special prioritized services or applications to 'jump' the queue, getting processed first, reducing latency for these essential services and applications.
Speed Limiting (Bandwidth)
If multiple access packets enter the queue simultaneously, the buffer may overflow, leading to potential data packet loss. Speed limiting (also known as packet shaping) restricts the number of packets the queue accepts from a specific source, automatically discarding any excess packets the source attempts to send.
This forces the source to reduce the number of packets it tries to send to limit the bandwidth it consumes. Lower-priority access sources may be speed-limited to a specific level, causing higher-priority services to be the reason for throttling all other access traffic to free up bandwidth.
Configure Quality of Service (QoS) to enhance the online gaming and video streaming experience
Most Quality of Service mechanisms are handled through the router. This is because Quality of Service acts as the 'connection link' between your device and the Internet, serving as the ideal location to inspect incoming data and prioritize it across various devices on the network.
If using Wifi, you clearly have the opportunity to utilize Quality of Service. Many devices and routers support a protocol called Wifi Multimedia (WMM), automatically categorizing data into 4 types: Voice, Video, Best Effort, and Background in descending order of priority.
Most routers come with built-in Quality of Service, though some routers may be more complex. Users typically find Quality of Service in the Advanced section of the router's customized web interface window.
Types of Priority Data
There are two primary ways to designate priorities for Quality of Service: device-based and application-based.
Device-Based Priority Assignment
You can decide which specific device needs prioritization among all devices, such as a game console. Each device has unique factors for its identification on the network, including: IP address, MAC address, and server name.
Since each device has a unique MAC address that remains unchanged, the MAC address is considered the optimal solution for device identification. However, if necessary, you can use factors like IP address, MAC address, and server name to identify a device.
Assigning priorities for Quality of Service based on devices involves finding the device's MAC address (typically found in the device's network settings) and entering that MAC address into the Quality of Service setup page.
At this point, the router recognizes the associated MAC and IP addresses, identifying any access traffic directed to or from that IP address and can prioritize that access traffic.
Assigning priorities based on applications
This is the most common type: priority levels designated based on the port or application from which a portion of data originates. Instead of prioritizing traffic for the entire device, it prioritizes for a specific type of data.
For example, if all BitTorrent access traffic goes through port 54321, you can set a rule for port 54321 with a low priority level, providing bandwidth only after all other applications have received the bandwidth they need.
Conversely, if you set a rule stating that Skype on port 33333 should have the highest priority, Skype access traffic will be processed first (to reduce latency) while also providing ample bandwidth that the Skype application requires.
Quality of Service supports latency-sensitive access traffic (such as gaming) and bandwidth-sensitive access traffic (like Netflix), allowing everything to run more smoothly even in a heavily congested network.
Enhance your online gaming and video streaming experience by configuring Quality of Service (QoS) for each application or prioritizing a specific device. Your router is equipped with some Quality of Service features, so why not try configuring Quality of Service (QoS) to improve your online gaming and video streaming experience.
