Introduction Load Balancing Mikrotik

Bandwidth management is an essential part of everyday operation for typcial ISPs, businesses, and even everday home users. There are many different types of management tools available to RouterOS users, QOS, rate-limiting, packet-limiting, to name a few.

I personally operate a wireless ISP, in an area that has no other type of convential high-speed internet (ie. cable, fibre, or DSL). Not having access to fibre myself, I am in a situation where the single fastest backbone connection I can get does not provide enough bandwidth for me to have only one connection. As a result of this limitation load-balancing multiple internet backbone connections is very important.


In the past I have used ECMP, persistent per connection styled load-balancing (see http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Load_Balancing), as well as various other methods. However, I found all of them lacking in various different areas (not load-balancing correctly, broken large HTTP downloads, IM problems, to name a few issues). I then investigated a way to give me more control over my bandwidth while minimizing the potential problems. The end result was a per-traffic type of load-balancing. This tutorial is designed address that one specific area in depth, at a later date, I may expand/add additional info on fail-over, QOS, and other topics.