SmartShare® User Manual
The SmartShare Bandwidth Management System
This section describes the SmartShare bandwidth management system in details, and is written for network experts only.
User Load Balancing
Conventional routers simply forward all packets to/from users in the same order the packets arrive at the router, so the users with a lot of packets get a larger share of the available bandwidth than the users with fewer packets.
The SmartShare User Load Balancer intelligently forwards packets to/from individual users in turn, so every user gets a reasonable share of the available bandwidth.
User Identification
The SmartShare identifies individual users by their IP address presented to the LAN interface on the SmartShare. This also means that if a group of users in an apartment shares the apartment’s network connection through another NAT router in the apartment, they will be treated as one single user, because that NAT router only presents one IP address to the SmartShare.
The IP address range controlled by the SmartShare is visible on the LAN configuration menu. Each IP address in this range is considered an individual user.
Advanced administrators can use the Bandwidth User Groups to specify which IP address ranges are controlled by the SmartShare. When specifying an address range, you have the option of choosing to identify all IP addresses from a /24 subnet as one user.
Overflow Users
All IP addresses outside the controlled address range are considered overflow users, and will be crammed together and treated as a single virtual user by the SmartShare. This means that the overflow users can access the Internet, but the entire group of overflow users will only get the bandwidth of one single user.
There is no bandwidth distribution within the group of overflow users. A single heavy user in the group of overflow users can consume all the bandwidth assigned to the group of overflow users, and thus block the connection for the other overflow users.
Download and Upload Limiters
The SmartShare monitors the download and upload bandwidth, and while there is bandwidth enough, all users can use all the bandwidth they like.
When the download bandwidth becomes overloaded, the SmartShare starts restricting the heavy users by activating the Download Limiter.
When the upload bandwidth becomes overloaded, the SmartShare starts restricting the heavy users by activating the Upload Limiter.
The SmartShare Download and Upload Limiters are designed to ensure that no single user is limited more than appropriate.
Advanced administrators can use the Bandwidth User Groups to specify maximum download and upload bandwidth per user in each group of users.
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