How to configure Session Limit and Bandwidth Control to control traffic on SafeStream routers using the new GUI

In a private network, the bandwidth is shared by all hosts. If any one of the hosts occupies most of the bandwidth, there will bring negative influence on the performance of the whole network. To avoid this situation, we often need to restrict the bandwidth of some specific hosts.

We can implement this on our business Safestream router using Session Limit and Bandwidth Control.

Session Limit:

In computer science, a session means the interaction between two communication end points. For example, when you browse a website, your computer and the web server need to interact with each other to exchange commands and data. The interaction can be considered as a session. When browsing a website, the session count is around 80, which will not affect your internet speed. However, when downloading using a P2P software, there can be thousands of sessions. Therefore, if some local hosts use too many sessions, the communication quality of the other hosts will be affected.

Session Limit feature limits the number of sessions that a LAN host can use. This feature can prevent the router's resources and bandwidth from being exhausted by some hosts which use too many sessions at one time.

Bandwidth Control:

You can control the bandwidth by configuring bandwidth control rules to limit various data flows. In this way, the network bandwidth can be reasonably distributed and utilized.

For example, in a private network, we need to restrict the bandwidth of the hosts whose IP address ranges from 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.100.

Configuring Session Limit:

1. Go to Preference > IP Group > IP Address to add an IP address entry. This entry defines the IP range of the hosts to be restricted.

2. Go to Preference > IP Group > IP Group to

3. Go to Transmission > Bandwidth Control, enable Session Limit globally.

4. Add a session limit rule to restrict the number of sessions for the user group.

Configuring Bandwidth Control:

1. Go to Transmission > Bandwidth Control to enable Bandwidth Control globally.

2. Add a bandwidth control rule to restrict the maximum bandwidth of the user group.

Note: The upper limits of “Maximum Upstream Bandwidth” and “Maximum Downstream Bandwidth” are the values of “Upstream Bandwidth” and “Downstream Bandwidth” configured on Network > WAN >WAN page.