Hi Everyone,
nowadays many Access point vendor supports Air time fairness option on their access point models.
let's know more about ATF and when to use and when to not use this feature.
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What is ATF:
Here are three different definitions I found online from 3 different vendors:
1. Airtime Fairness is a feature that boosts the overall network performance by sacrifice a little bit of network time on your slowest devices. Note: The relatively “slow” wifi speed devices can be slow from either long physical distance, weak signal strength, or simply being a legacy device with older technology.
Airtime Fairness technology aims to increase overall Wi-Fi network performance by solving the problem of a slow client.
2. For Wi-Fi technology, network bandwidth can be limited by the speed of the slowest device. You may have noticed that wireless devices are slower than usual on a Wi-Fi network with more clients than usual. For example, a client with an 802.11ac adapter at 433 Mbps and a slow client with an 802.11a adapter (at 54 Mbps) are simultaneously connected to an 802.11ac Wi-Fi access point. When a slow device is highly active (for example, when downloading a large file from the Internet), there will be an overall decrease in Wi-Fi network bandwidth. This slowdown happens because data transmission to each client is limited to the number of packets, so fast devices are continually waiting for slow clients to transmit data. Airtime Fairness technology helps reduce the negative impact of slow devices on wireless network bandwidth. With the help of Airtime Fairness, the router limits the transfer of data not to the number of packets, but the time to transfer, regardless of the number of transmitted data. All Wi-Fi clients are given the same time for data transfer. In a single period, fast clients manage to send more data. In this case, there will be a slight decrease in bandwidth only on slow devices, but there will be no decrease in fast clients' performance and the entire Wi-Fi network. Thus, it helps provide clients with equal access to the radio environment, despite the channel rate of data transmission.
3. Airtime Fairness ensures that every client has equal access to air time, regardless of client capability (Operating system, 802.11 modes, RSSI). The regulated wireless spectrum, where all wireless communication takes place, is shared amongst all clients on the wireless access point as well as neighboring APs on the same channel. The Meraki Auto RF feature suite (Auto Channel & Auto TX) minimizes co-channel interference (CCI) which helps ensure neighboring APs are not unfairly utilizing airtime in the coverage area of any single AP. The Meraki Airtime Fairness (ATF) feature ensures that co-existing clients connected to a single AP have equal access to the airtime in the APs coverage area.
Above 3 definitions explaining the same point.
When To Use Airtime Fairness:
You should generally enable Airtime Fairness when you have several devices connected to the network, especially so if you have connected legacy devices along with faster wifi devices.
Second, you should generally enable Airtime Fairness when you are offering public wifi like in a cafe or retail shop kind of scenario. You want to make sure that every customer connected to your Wifi gets their fair share of wifi data. Instead of one really slow device that monopolize the entire network traffic.
Third, enable Airtime Fairness when you wish to sacrifice some of the networking time from the slow devices so that your faster devices can achieve a better quality of service. This is similar in idea on why you should separate different technology of devices similar to the recommendation of “N Support Only” type of settings.
Based on this, here is a real-life situation where you may want to enable Airtime Fairness is that you know you have a device that is fast, and you want it to be optimized “faster”.
For example, imagine you have a gaming computer located in the living room next to the router, and you have a slower family computer running BitTorrent upstairs, or maybe a mobile device like iPhone, iPad, Huawei, or Samsung android. You want to ENABLE the airtime fairness so that your gaming computer can perform as optimally as it allowed.
When to Disable Airtime Fairness Off?
First off, not all the devices support Airtime Fairness completely. They can sometimes get confused by the reduced amount of data, this can cause fluctuating signals and occasionally dropped connections. So do disable Airtime Fairness when your devices do not play well together with the router. And hope that with better firmware and applications they can take advantage of the router configuration.
Second, you should disable Airtime Fairness when you actually want better performance on the slower device. Imagine this scenario that is opposite of the one mentioned earlier: You have a gaming computer located in your bedroom far away from the router in the living room, however, there is a family computer located in the living room that is running BitTorrent uncapped.
In this situation, your online gaming computer in your bedroom upstairs is time-critical and important. You actually want as many network resources dedicated to that. You DO NOT want to turn on Airtime Fairness in this case. The router will dedicate more resources to the family computer (because it is faster by being closer to the router), which results in worse connection and lag for your personal gaming purposes.
The only exception to this rule is that some advanced routers allow you to specify the device that you wish to prioritize.
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@E.DR_91 @Unicef @dragos_v @Somemeow @Lan59 @MahMush @bek7 @IndianKid
Sources:routerguide.net,keenetic.com,meraki.com
