By fairly sharing the WLAN transmission time between all of the active clients, the available bandwidth is used to maximum effect and WLAN performance is improved.
Especially in WLAN scenarios with a high client-density, the devices have to compete for the
available bandwidth. Here, the AP offers transmission slots to each of the clients in
turn—without any consideration for the necessary transmission times. Legacy clients end up
slowing down faster clients, even though the faster ones could complete their data
transmission more quickly. The feature "Airtime Fairness" ensures that the available
bandwidth is used efficiently. To this end, the WLAN transmission time ("airtimes") is
fairly distributed between the active clients. The consequence: Thanks to all clients being
provided with the same airtime, faster clients can achieve more data throughput in the same
amount of time.
"Airtime" refers to the WLAN transmission time. Airtime Fairness provides WLAN transmission time to all of the active clients according to the mode configured for the Airtime Fairness. This, for example, stops older clients from slowing down more modern clients.
Note: For devices with WLAN modules supporting the IEEE 802.11ac standard, the
Airtime Fairness feature is automatically enabled in the WLAN module.
