In wireless networks what does DTIM do, and can it increase wireless network performance?
I've seen some routers with the option of configuring the DTIM interval, most of them are set to 1 or 2.
What is the purpose of the setting?
Solution 1:
The DTIM is how the AP (wireless router) warns its clients that it is about to transmit the multicast (and broadcast*) frames it queued up since the previous DTIM.
This queueing and scheduled delivery is done to allow power-conscious devices to save power by turning off their receivers for brief stretches of time, only waking up their receivers when the AP indicates is has traffic for them. This procedure is only performed if one or more of the currently-associated clients on the AP is in power-save mode. If no clients are in power save mode, the AP will transmit multicasts as soon as they come in.
The DTIM interval is essentially meaningless and can be safely ignored. A shorter DTIM interval could theoretically make your wireless devices use up their batteries faster, because they'd have to wake up more often for multicasts. A longer DTIM interval could theoretically hinder multicast performance on your network. But either way, it is extremely unlikely that you'll be able to notice any difference that the DTIM interval setting makes. You'd have to set up a special, sensitive test to look for any difference, and I'm still not sure you'd be able to reliably measure one.
*in 802.11, broadcasts are a subset of multicasts, so wherever I wrote "multicasts", you can read it as "multicasts or broadcasts".
Solution 2:
For some environments the DTIM can be critical.
We use IPods (IOS 6) as Nurse Call Alerting devices, via push e-mail.
Apple was very aggressive about saving battery life when the changed from IOS 5 to 6.
Push mail being sent when DTIM set to lower value cause unreliable mail delivery.
By changing the DTIM setting on our wireless controller (AP manager) from 3 to 1, we improved mail delievery from 95% to 99%.
P.S. We initially changed the IPods to not "auto lock" which turns off battery saving, however battery life was reduced to 4 hours maximum, which was not acceptable.
Bottom line is for some deployments the DTIM is very important.