Advanced Router Featues | Home Network

Today we are going to talk about some of the hidden features that you may have in your router that greater increases your effectiveness of your home network. Some of you may have it, and some of you don't. For those of you who don't have the features in your home network router, don't worry, this post is still a good informational read for you so when you buy your next router, you will know what to look out for.

Quality of Service
Quality of service which is also more commonly known as QoS, is a function many more advanced home router may have. Basically, when a router have QoS functionality, it has the ability to allocate a portion of guarantee-ed traffic to a certain computer. For example, let's say you have 2 computers at home. One of them you use it for office work and downloading big files while the other you use it for real time video conferencing. Now, when you are going to do video conferencing with another party, this uses a lot of traffic in your home network, but you also don't want your big file transfers to interfere with the video conferencing traffic. In this instance, you can allocate a certain amount of bandwidth to be going to the computer doing the video conferencing. The computer doing the file download will not be allowed to use more then the allocated bandwidth for it. In this way, the router makes sure that there is always a certain amount of bandwidth allocated to the video conferencing computer.

Static Routing and Port Forwarding
Another common feature found in home network routers is the ability to do Port Forwarding or more commonly known as NAT or Network Address Translation. Some software especially those P2P file sharing software, needs to listen and communicate on a certain port. These software have a lot of problems working behind a router because the computers behind the router have private IP as posted in the previous post. So the home network router allows you to specify a particular port to be mapped to a certain computer. When the traffic comes into that particular port, it is forwarded immediately to that computer. For example, if one of your computers behind the home network router has the IP address 192.168.0.5 and you need port 6776 to be served with the computer, you specify port 6776 to be mapped to 192.168.0.5 in the home network router setting. When a traffic from the Internet arrives at your home network router and the port is 6776, it will be transferred immediately to the computer at 192.168.0.5. In this way, it is as if the computer at 192.168.0.5 is connected directly to the Internet.