Mesh/Bandwidth Quotas

See Also: Technical Documentation, Monitoring

notes about bandwidth monitoring and quotas

The system can apportion the shareable bandwidth to a percentage of total bandwidth available. The goal is to find a way to cap bandwidth usage, in and out. Here we research how this can be done.

monitoring

to track bandwidth we need a way to quantify it. Here are some likely candidates:

• bandwidthd - very popular, but apparently it is resource heavy
• bmon - download it
• iftop, man page - "iftop does for network usage what top(1) does for CPU usage. It listens to network traffic on a named interface and displays a table of current bandwidth usage by pairs of hosts."

= ipt-account

ipt-account is an iptables module capable of recording e.g. traffic usage on different interfaces and subnets. This is what the EFF open wireless router uses. They currently use a python script that calls the iptaccount command to get usage info and display it in the browser. It is unclear how they persist the usage data between reboots.

tc − show / manipulate traffic control settings

Tc is used to configure Traffic Control in the Linux kernel.

• man page for tc: http://man.cx/tc
• Ixgr's setup using tc to fix bufferfloat: http://blog.lxgr.net/posts/2013/01/28/my-openwrt-setup/

QOS

Quality of Service (qos-scripts) configuration

Once we have the monitoring in hand we can then handle the bandwidth caps. We might want to cut off access once the limit has been reached.

• How to set up QoS bandwidth rate limit on OpenWRT

ubus

OpenWrt micro bus architecture - there is a Lua module for ubus...