Mikrotik IP Packing

Mikrotik has, since at least version 2.8, a protocol built into ROS that will allow you to aggregate packets as well as do come compression. I had installed version 5 on a test machine and was poking around when I happened across this.

From what I understand this may or may not work across all tunnel types, so buyer beware. This is supposed to work properly with standard ethernet interfaces.

In effect, what you do is specify an aggregate size. The router will then collect packets until it has enough to fill that aggregate size before it will send. I assume that it will send after X amount of time if it hasn’t collected enough packets, though I’m not sure what that time is.

Packing is what you do to packets as they leave and unpacking is what is done to packets as they arrive.

Packing options:
Simple : Just do packet aggregation
Compress-all : Aggregate packets, compress payload and header
Compress-headers : Aggregate packets, compress header only
None : Send packets unchanged

As an interesting side note, ip neighbors is used for communication of this protocol and must be enabled on all participating interfaces. The wiki article also cautions that this will cause latency, which I hope you could have gleaned from the aggregation explination 😉