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Mikrotik - QoS for VoIP traffic

We have a Mikrotik wireless network consisting of a few towers and a few offices connecting to them.

We struggle with voip call quality between these offices. Sometimes it is one-way speech, or the calls just fades away and drops.

I am trying to implement QoS. I scanned the traffic and saw that the traffic going to and from the VoIP servers uses UDP with ports 2000 - 3000.

I created firewall mangle rules with which I mark the packets as follow: UDP ports 2000 - 3000 gets marked as "VoIP packets" and all the other traffic (! 2000 - 3000 UDP) gets marked as "The Rest"
.
I created a Queue Trees as follow:

VoIP Queue Tree:
Packet-mark=VOIP packets, Parent = Wireless default, Priority = 2

The Rest Queue Tree:
Packet-mark=The Rest, Parent = Wireless default, Priority = 8

I read that one should leave Priority 1 for routing.

I created these rules and Queues on all the towers, but with no luck.

Can someone please assist me with this.

meverest

Hi,

if it is just the wireless part of the network you are concerned about, then you can often get good results just by turning on WMM support on the AP and cpe devices (look under WLAN 'wireless' properties)

but also you should try to be certain that it is a bandwidth issue and not a general wireless problem that is causing the trouble - are you using a proprietary wireless protocol (nstreme, nv2) on the wireless network?

Cheers, Mike.

chosen-one

ASKER

Hi meverest,

I am not using proprietary wirless protocol (nstreme,nv2) on my network.

We had our main mikrotik gateway between the Lan with all the servers and the wireless network installed as a Xen virtual machine. We saw that there was ping time outs between the lan and this virtual machine. So we chnaged it over to a physical server on Friday. This solved the time-out ping problem. It happened apaarently because there is no Xen server tools available for mikrotik.

I enabled the WMM support as you suggested. We however still experience problems on the network - only on the VoIP part - the rest of the applications works 100%.

I then deleted all the queus and mangle rules that we created before.

I found an article on the internet and then added the following rule on our main router (border router):

/ip firewall mangle
add action=change-dscp chain=prerouting comment=“Voip Server"
disabled=no dst-address=192.168.1.16/29 new-dscp=6

(192.168.1.16/29 is our VoiP servers)

I added the following on al our towers and ap's on the network, as well as on the routers installed at all the offices:

/ip firewall mangle
add action=set-priority chain=postrouting comment="Translate DSCP
Values into WMM priorities“ new-priority=from-dscp
passthrough=yes

So as it looks to me it will automatically give the VoIP traffic with the DSCP mark 6 higher priority all over the network as for the rest of the traffic which will be default have a DSCP mark of 0.

We still experience intermittent issues. It will work fine for a few hours, then all of a sudden one-way speech, or the calls will just fade away.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

meverest

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chosen-one

ASKER

Mike,

Thanks again for the info!

Would you say it is still necessary to add separate Queues on the towers (AP's) to limit access to certain applications? Say for instance limit access to the proxy server port 8080 to say 1MB, access to the e-mail server to 1MB, or would the DSCP & WMM priorities do the job.

Thanks for all your suggestions so far.

SOLUTION

meverest

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