Intelligent Load Balancing

Technical Support for Routers 4G LTE, 5G NR, USB modems
1

I own an E750V2 (Mudi V2) and have been using the load balancing feature so I can get enough bandwidth to work while I’m traveling.

One big thing I’m trying to figure out is some sort of intelligent load balancing. Here’s a few scenarios I’ve run into:

  1. In one place I’m at the Wi-Fi isn’t stable and the speeds are normally 30mbps, but every 5 minutes or so the drop to nearly zero for about 30-45 seconds. I’m using repeater and a SIM card that’s getting a stable 16mbps. If I load balance for the ideal, I get a solid 40-45mbps, but when the WiFi drops down, I’m getting like 5mbps since it’s still trying to mainly prioritize the WiFi.

If I prioritize the load balancing to be more even, it levels out the low points more, and I get like 10mbps, but at the peaks I’m only getting 30mbps.

Note: I know this is a wacky scenario, but I don’t have any control over it and need something stable to work.

  1. When temporarily connecting to a different slow wifi over repeater and also using the cellular, I now have to redo the load balancing to prioritize the cellular more. I sometimes work from another location that has quite slow WiFi (5-10 mbps due to heavy congestion).

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Basically I’m looking for a solution that can more intelligently and on the fly do the load balancing. Minimally a button that would test the various connection and load balance automatically for when moving to a different setup (and you can fine tune manually). But even better, if it could intelligently spread the load based on what each source could handle at any given moment.

2

This isn’t possible because load balancing does not work like that. Normally, load balancing is used for 2 network connections that are more or less similar to each other. All other scenarios are more like a failover - which wouldn’t cover your requirements as well.

Load balancing can’t aggregate connections - so it’s never possible to get a great connection if you just combine 2 bad connections.

As such load-balancing will help speed multiple separate downloads or traffic generated from a group of source PCs all accessing different sites but it will not speed up a single download from one PC (unless the download is spread across multiple IP streams such as by using a download manager)

The used package mwan3 isn’t able to do more intelligent load balancing. (See) Knowing how “good” the connection quality would require permanent speed tests while idle - nothing OpenWrt seem to support. SD-WAN bonding is rare, there are a few special companies that support it.

My advice would be to get rid of the worst connection and stay with the 2nd worst one.
Or you need to adjust the priority based on your knowledge.

3

The closest I have found to what you are requesting that is within the realm of home users and that appears to handle load balancing better than the very basic features that MWAN3 offers is the Draytek Vigor Session-Based Load Balancing feature. Works reasonably well on my two poorly balanced ISPs: