Thursday, June 25, 2009

Tip of the day: decrease MTU for a better wireless transmission

That's a small tip: when you are dealing with a noisy channel, you can decrease the MTU (1500 by default). Indeed, as an insight, if the noise destroys a "big" packet, there will be more to retransmit than if the packet was small. The drawback is that you will put more load on your devices, and sometimes some host will refuse the connection.

Anyway:


ifconfig wlan0 mtu 1000


where wlan0 is your wireless interface.

Note that one should not confound the MTU with the fragmentation threshold. The fragmentation threshold is one layer below the MTU.

No comments:

Post a Comment