MikroTik RouterOS Bandwidth Test

Document revision 27-Mar-2002
This document applies to MikroTik RouterOS v2.4 and v2.5

Overview

The Bandwidth Tester can be used to monitor the throughput only to a remote MikroTik router (either wired or wireless) and thereby help to discover network ‘bottlenecks’.

The TCP test uses the standard TCP protocol with acknowledgments and follows the TCP algorithm on how many packets to send according to latency, dropped packets, and other features in the TCP algorithm. Please review the TCP protocol for details on its internal speed settings and how to analyze its behavior. Statistics for throughput are calculated using the entire size of the TCP packet. As acknowledgments are an internal working of TCP, their size and usage of the link are not included in the throughput statistics. Therefore this statistic is not as reliable as the UDP statistic when estimating throughput.

The UDP tester sends 110% or more packets than currently reported as received on the other side of the link. To see the maximum throughput of a link, the packet size should be set for the maximum MTU allowed by the links – usually this is 1500 bytes. There is no acknowledgment required by UDP; this implementation means that the closest approximation of the throughput can be seen.

Topics covered in this manual:

What's New in v2.5?

The MikroTik RouterOS v2.5 has a different Bandwidth test features compared to the previous versions. When migrating from v2.4 to v2.5, please note that:

Installation

The Bandwidth Test feature is included in the 'system' package. No installation is needed for this feature

Hardware Resource Usage

!Caution! Bandwidth Test uses all available bandwidth (by default) and may impact network usability.

There is no other significant resource usage.

Bandwidth Test Description

Bandwidth Test uses TCP or UDP protocol for test. The test tries to use maximum or partial amount of bandwidth to test link speed. Note that remote router must be MikroTik router in order to run the test. Be aware that default test uses all available bandwidth and may impact network usability.

[MikroTik] tool> bandwidth-test ?
Bandwidth Test uses TCP or UDP protocol for test. Tries to use maximum or partial amount of
bandwidth to test link speed. Note that remote router must be MikroTik router 
in order to run the test. Be aware that default test uses all available 
bandwidth and may impact network usability.

        <address>
        direction  Direction of data flow
               do
         duration  How long should the test take
         interval  Interval between sent packets
   local-tx-speed  
         password  Password for remote user
         protocol  Protocol to use for test
  remote-tx-speed
             size  UDP packet size or TCP segment size
             user  remote user
[MikroTik] tool>

Descriptions of arguments:

address - IP address of destination host.
direction - (both/receive/transmit) specify the direction of the test, default is transmit
do - Script source
duration - Duration of the test
interval - (optional) Delay between messages (in seconds). Default is 1 second. Can be 20ms...5s.
local-tx-speed - Transfer test maximum speed (must be given in bits per second)
password - Password for remote user
protocol - Type of protocol to use (UDP or TCP, default TCP).
remote-tx-speed - Receive test maximum speed (must be given in bits per second)
size - Packet size in bytes (50..1500, default 512). Works only with UDP protocol.
user - Remote user

Bandwidth Test Examples

[MikroTik] tool> bandwidth-test 10.0.0.224 duration=14s protocol=udp size=1500 direction=both
               status: done testing
           tx-current: 33.98Mbps
 tx-10-second-average: 25.56Mbps
     tx-total-average: 19.07Mbps
           rx-current: 33.96Mbps
 rx-10-second-average: 26.45Mbps
     rx-total-average: 19.83Mbps

[MikroTik] tool>



[MikroTik] tool> bandwidth-test 10.0.0.152 local-tx-speed=3000 remote-tx-speed=5000 direction=both
               status: running
           tx-current: 90.00bps
 tx-10-second-average: 90.00bps
     tx-total-average: 2.76kbps
           rx-current: 96.00bps
 rx-10-second-average: 96.00bps
     rx-total-average: 5.97kbps

[MikroTik] tool> 


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