Optimize Wi-Fi for VoIP, video, and gaming

If your Skype or Second Life application is frequently disconnected, or when someone starts a World of Warcraft game, your iTunes Transfer Stream becomes congested, consider it, how to improve these problems without buying a new device. In the past few years, most of the wireless routers sold have QoS functions, but you may still want to update the firmware of the router to solve the problem.

Let's take a Linksys router as an example. We can make some changes through the configuration program. First, make sure that your device supports WMMWi-Fi multimedia. In this way, you can find the QoS menu in the "Application and game" option. Then, configure Internet Access Priority) to your voice and multimedia applications. In this case, you can select a specific application from the drop-down menu, and then select a higher priority level, medium, normal, or low), and then click the Add button. For example, you can set a lower priority for BitTorrent and other download services, and a higher priority for your VoIP service.

Speaking of WMM, it is actually a subset of the IEEE 802.11e standard, which defines the quality of service QoS for Wi-Fi ). Without QoS, all applications running on different devices have the same opportunity to transmit data frames. This method works well for data traffic from web browsers, file transfers, e-mails, and other applications, but it does not work for multimedia applications. VoIP, video streams, and interactive games are highly sensitive to the increase in latency and the decrease in throughput. WMM shortens the transmission time of packets with high traffic priorities.

Based on the EDCA (Enhanced Distributed Channel Access) method, WMM defines the centralized Media Access categories in priority order, which can shorten the transmission time of packets with high traffic priorities. The Wi-Fi Alliance has also released the WMM node authentication feature to customize power mechanisms based on specific applications and save power without sacrificing service quality, extend the battery life of end devices by 15% to 40%.

Currently, more and more consumer electronic products such as VoIP phones, televisions, and game consoles that support the Wi-Fi function support the WMM function, as do related wireless router devices.

In addition, some devices can help you set the priority on a specific Voice device, such as directly connecting to a VoIP phone in your wireless network. At the same time, not all routers can configure priority on specific applications or devices. However, you can at least enable QoS or WMM, which will help you automatically optimize multimedia transmission streams. these settings are disabled by default in many routers.

Key Points of Wi-Fi optimization:

Enable corresponding options in your Wi-Fi router configuration program to optimize multimedia bytes;

Determine the application priority in your wireless network one by one in the Internet access priority list;

Compared with download services such as BitTorrent, you should give your voice and multimedia applications a higher priority.

1. Quick introduction to wireless network technology-Wi-Fi
2. Why wireless technology Wi-Fi