Notes on settings for an Asus RT-AC3200 router
Good info here: http://routerguide.net http://www.rickygao.com/tuning-the-asus-wireless-router-to-best-performance/ http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-howto/32653-asus-rt-ac3200-smart-connect-the-missing-manual
| Setting | Default | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Adaptive QoS | off | probably no reason to turn this on unless I need to prioritize traffic |
| Adaptive QoS bandwidth monitor | off | might be interesting to turn on just to see what is going on |
| Enable Radio | on | self-explanatory |
| Enable wireless scheduler | off | Allows wireless to be turned on/off on a schedule |
| Set AP Isolated | off | makes it so devices on the network can't talk each other, can boost performance, leave this off |
| Roaming assistant | off | will cause clients to disconnect if they have a weak signal and connect to a stronger AP, might be worth trying out if there are multiple access points in different parts of the house or in leiu of Smart Connect |
| Enable IGMP Snooping | off | helps when there is lots of multicast traffic (such as Apple Airplay), but can cause performance issues with the router since the processor needs to work harder to look for this traffic |
| Multicast rate | auto | router bunches up messages and sends them as multicast to avoid collisions, can boost performance but seems like it would have a latency cost, have to play around with it to find the best setting |
| Preamble Type | Long | long has better error checking but can reduce performance, some older devices only support long, turning this to short may boost performance but may cause some older devices to not be able to connect and may cause more errors particularly for devices farther away, something to try |
| AMPDU RTS | on | helps deal with congestion problems, not much info available, could look into this one more to understand how it works |
| RTS Threshold | presumably a tweak for AMPDU RTS | |
| DTIM Interval | 3 | Goes hand-in-hand with beacon interval, buffers broadcast and multicast traffic for devices that are sleeping, 3 means DTIM will be sent on every 3 beacons, can optimize battery life by setting this higher, but router may have some trouble buffering data and could crash or cause issues |
| Beacon interval | 100 | helps devices discover APs so they can switch between them, increasing this can improve performance by saving bandwidth but makes it harder for devices to switch APs |
| Enable TX Bursting | on | only applies to B and G clients, on by default but may want to disable it because it can cause B and G clients to dominate the network during bursting sessions |
| Enable WMM APSD | enabled | there is no disadvantage, helps mobile devices save power |
| Enhanced Interference Management | off | not able to find a lot of info but consensus seems to be that it can boost speed, but cause connection drops, for some reason not available on the 5GHz-1 radio, might be something to try. Best description I could find: http://www.snbforums.com/threads/increase-wi-fi-performance.11343/#post-70675 |
| Reducing USB 3.0 Interference (2.4 GHz only) | on | enabling will increase USB 3.0 speed but affect 2.4 GHz range |
| Optimize AMPDU aggregation | off | aggregates data to improve performance with the expense of latency, can improve throughput but be bad for e.g. gaming or VOIP due to latency |
| Turbo QAM (2.4 GHz only) | on | better performance, both router and client must support it, may want to look into this more to make sure my devices support it and/or make sure it doesn't hurt performance of devices that don't support it |
| Airtime Fairness | on | prevents slow devices from dominating the network but causes slow devices to be slower |
| Explicit beamforming (2.4 GHz only) | on | changes channel and direction of wireless signal, router and device must support, mostly supported on AC but also supported on N, though N devices can have compatibility issues |
| 802.11ac beamforming (5 GHz only) | on | changes channel and direction of wireless signal, router and device must support, mostly supported on AC but also supported on N, though N devices can have compatibility issues (assumed this is the same as Explicit beamforming on 2.4G) |
| Universal beamforming | on | not a universal standard and different routers have different implementations, router estimates direction of the data sent and received, and boosts the downlink speed only, turning this off may help Explicit beamforming work better. But may want to be careful about reducing range since this works with AiRadar. |
| TX Power adjustment | 100% | didn't look into this one but seems self explanatory |