Router

The router is the traffic controller of your network, providing a couple off services needed to keep your network sane:

• Providing a network/internet gateway: the router is the border control between the scoring network and any other network it is connected to, including internet connection.
• Firewall: to keep your network safe, most routers offer a firewall service which will prevent unauthorized access to your network from outside.
• DHCP server: this is the server which distributes IP-addresses to the devices connected to the network.
  

Both firewall and DHCP server are services which can also be provided by separate devices, but in order not to make things more complicated than needed, it seems better to use the services that are already provided by most routers on the market by default.

Router requirements

• Consumer grade routers often have WiFi on board, for reasons that we will explain in detail in the page about the WiFi setup, we prefer not to combine the router and WiFi function.
• Maximal throughput of the router might be important (and scales with the number of users on the network). Consumer market routers can have high throughput numbers, but tend to focus on providing fast connections to a small number of users. Professional devices will be more focused on providing stable connections to a larger number of users.
• By default most routers on the market offer external network/internet connection by means of a cable. If you are sure that this is possible in the venue(s) your will be using, or don’t need internet access during your competition, this might be sufficient. Otherwise you might want to shop for a router which has other means of connecting to the internet, such as WAN over WiFi or a 4G (mobile network) fallback.
• Routers tend to have a rather small number of network connections (2 to 10). If you need more connections, it might be easier and certainly cheaper to add one or more switches to the setup (see next page) than buying a router with more connections.

Configuration aspects

When configuring your router, you might take following thing into consideration:

IP range

Most routers come with a default setting for the IP-range that is used to assign IP-addresses to the connected devices. For example: 192.168.0.*, which means that in most cases the router itself will be using the address 192.168.0.1 and assign addresses 192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.254 to the devices.

It is a good idea to change this range. First off all, since you will want to integrate with the network in the venue, chances are high that this network will be using the same range, which might cause conflicts. Switching to a less obvious range will avoid this problem.

Another limitation of the default range, is the maximal number of addresses which can be used (about 250). Even if this might seem more than enough, you need to take into account that the number of occupied addresses can be higher than the actual number of active devices. For many competitions there might never be a problem, however if you are changing to a different range, you can as well chose one that has more addresses available.

Fixed IP addresses

In the router (actually the DHCP server), you can assign a fixed IP address to devices. This is linked with the so called mac-address of the network connection: each network device has a unique id.

Some devices can only work with a fixed IP-address (e.g. network connected printers). For other devices such as the computer(s) that you will use as a server for the scoring system, it is optional but strongly advised to use a fixed IP-address.

Examples of routers

Ubiquiti EdgeMax Routers

Ubiquiti offers range of routers with good value for money, including a wide range of setup possibilities for network configuration, security and monitoring network activity.

The smallest device in the range is the EdgeRouter X, which has 4 local network connections and an WAN (internet) connection. This device will serve you well for setups with up to about 30 users.
https://www.ubnt.com/edgemax/edgerouter-x/

For larger setups, you can upgrade to EdgeRouter Lite, which has 4 times the capacity in terms of throughput.
https://www.ubnt.com/edgemax/edgerouter-lite/

If you really want to be sure about capacity, you might consider the EdgeRouter (no suffix), which doubles the capacity once more.
https://www.ubnt.com/edgemax/edgerouter/

Peplink routers

If you want to have a router with multiple options for connecting to the internet, you will want to check out the Peplink routers. They are specializing in routers with redundant broadband connections in order to secure a permanent internet connection.

PepWave Surf SOHO

The Pepwave Surf SOHO is a model which can be connected to your network over UTP cable and has built-in fall-back for connecting to the internet over WiFi (WiFi as WAN). The 4G mobile connection is supported through a USB port, where you can plug in 4G modem.