How to use the Mikrotik Nv2 wireless protocol to increase wireless link throughput.

The Nv2 wireless protocol was developed by Mikrotik for use with Atheros 802.11n chips and legacy 802.11a/b/g chips starting from AR5212. The Mikrotik Nv2 is however not supported on older AR5211 and AR5210 chips.

The Nv2 protocol can be used to increase the throughput on Point-to-point or point-to-multipoint links. In this post, I will share with us on how to use the Nv2 feature on Mikrotik wireless radios.

By default, the wireless protocol on Mikrotik wireless interfaces is set to “unspecified”. While this feature works fine, the Mikrotik proprietary Nv2 wireless protocol has been found to increase wireless link stability and throughput by:

 

  1. Reducing polling overhead – Nv2 AP broadcasts uplink schedule to a group of clients instead of polling each client. This is also known as “group polling”. Because no time is wasted for polling each client individually, more time is left for actual data transmission. This improves throughput, especially in Point-to-Multipoint configurations.

 

  1. Reducing propagation delay overhead – Since clients are not polled individually, Nv2 allows the creation of uplink schedule based on estimated distance to clients such that media usage is most effective. This also improves throughput, especially in Point-to-Multipoint configurations.
Mikrotik Nv2
Image showing point-to-multi-point connections

Key features of the Mikrotik Nv2 wireless protocol:

  1. The Nv2 protocol is exclusive to only RouterOS devices.
  2. Nv2 Aps can only be seen during scanning by RouterOS devices
  3. The use Nv2 network will disturb other networks operating in the same channel
  4. Using Nv2 does not mean the network will not be affected by other networks operation in the same channel
  5. Nv2-enabled device will not connect to any other TDMA based network

 

You may also like: How to avoid interference on Mikrotik Point to point and point to multi-point links

How to enable Nv2 on a Mikrotik access point (AP)

To use the Mikrotik Nv2 feature on a RouterOS device, the wireless protocol on the wireless interface of such RouterOS device has to be changed from the default “unspecified” feature to to “Nv2”, bearing in mind that the connecting wireless client’s protocol must be set to either “Nv2” or “any” for a connection to be established. To enable Nv2 on a RouterOS AP device, see the commands below:

[admin@Mikrotik] > interface wireless set mode=ap-bridge wireless-protocol=nv2 ssid=TimiGate frequency=5220 security-profile=default

How to enable Nv2 on a Mikrotik station (Client)

For a wireless client to successfully connect to an Nv2 network, its wireless protocol must be set to either “any” or “Nv2”. To set the wireless protocol to Nv2, see commands belows:

[admin@Mikrotik] > interface wireless set mode=station wireless-protocol=nv2 ssid=TimiGate frequency=5220 security-profile=default

The Mikrotik  Nv2 protocol will stabilize the link connection rate and increase throughput though throughput values will not be visible to users.

Click here for more on Nv2

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