Is There A Way To Prioritize Incoming Traffic With A Router?

Is there a way to prioritize certain packets so that you would "request" packets at a lower or higher priority than another?

I was confused at first when trying to set up my D-Link DGL-4300 with GameFuel. I was under the impression that I could shape traffic to my will, prioritizing what kinds of traffic would come and go through my router. Unfortunately, I was wrong, after learning that GameFuel only affects outbound traffic.

Basically, what I would like to do is set up my network to prioritize incoming HTTP traffic and gaming traffic (by specifying port 80 and whatever ports that specific games would use) over my P2P traffic, which I would like to keep constantly on as I love to utilize the crap out of my bandwidth. (The way my mind works, I hate knowing my computer is on for nothing at home while I'm at work... I'd rather put it to work downloading things.)

I have one computer upstairs in the bedroom which serves as a streaming machine that feeds media to my XBox 360. It also serves as my uTorrent machine. My girlfriend is using my other computer downstairs to do AIM, surf the net, watch her shows, play World of Warcraft, and whatever else. When I start torrenting, obviously it hogs the crap out of my itty-bitty 192KB/s (1.5Mb) connection, which means that even surfing the 'net is actually painful. I could set uTorrent to limit its transfer rates so that I don't hog all of the bandwidth when I set it and forget it, but that means that there's precious bandwidth not being utilized if no one else is using the Internet for anything. I wish to set up my network so that the router knows to push all bandwidth usage towards my computer upstairs to feed uTorrent, but as soon as my girlfriend fires up World of Warcraft for a raid or something, I want it to be smart enough to prioritize traffic to feed WoW primarily and my P2P secondarily.

Is there a way? My Google-fu fails me, and I'm thinking the answer is no. Prove my thought wrong... please?

 

 

 

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I would take a look into the port forwarding option on your router. Almost all newer routern have them. What this allows you to do is to set it up so that your p2p ports only forward to a certain computer on your network. Then for example for WOW, you can set it nup so those TCP and UDP ports forward to a certain computer. It is completely customizable. Otherwise you will need to download a port forwarding software and set up a host computer to forward the ports to different computers in your household. Here is the port forwarding instructions for your router.

1.) To setup port forwarding on this router your computer needs to have a static ip address. Take a look at our Static IP Address guide to setup a static ip address. When you are finished setting up a static ip address, please come back to this page and enter the ip address you setup in the Static IP Address box below.
Do not skip this step!

2.) Open a web browser like internet explorer or Netscape. Enter the ip address of your router in the address bar of your browser. In the picture above the address bar has http://www.google.com in it. Just replace all of that with the ip address of your router. By default the ip address should be set to 192.168.0.1.

3.) You should see a box prompting you for your username and password. Enter your username and password now. By default the username is admin, and the password is admin. Click the Log In button to log in to your router.

4.) Click the Advanced button near the top of the page.

5.) Click the Gaming link near the left side of the page.

ADD GAME RULE
Enable :
Name :
IP Address :
TCP Ports to Open :
UDP Ports to Open :
Inbound Filter :
Schedule :

 

 

 

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I'm not sure if this is possible without programming anything of your own. What you could do is set up a schedule for limiting the speeds at the times of the day when you use the internet the most, and having the speed run at the maximum at times like 5am. I'm sure uTorrent has built-in functionality for this. You may need to limit the upload rate, as games might hog this.

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The thing that stinks about scheduling is that my girlfriend plays World of Warcraft at sporadic times of the day. And of course, she'll access the Internet when she wants to. I would LIKE to dynamically-shape bandwidth towards uTorrent when she's not using the Internet, but so far the solutions that I've seen only affects traffic shaping on the computer that the program is loaded on and does not affect anything over a network (which is something I'm trying to achieve).

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I found out why the Internet bogs down like crazy with uTorrent and how to fix it.

The secret is to disable NAT-PMP and most importantly, DHT. The sheer number of requests to connect to a ton of different peers floods the router itself and prevents any other requests from any device on the network to go through, resulting in time-outs and very slow Internet connectivity.

I still haven't found any solutions for inbound traffic shaping, but this ultimately solves the problem that I've been having for the longest time.

Basically: if you are running uTorrent and the Internet slows down to a standstill, but it comes back if you shut uTorrent off, disable NAT-PMP and DHT. Allowing fewer global connections works too in conjunction with disabling these two features.

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