Wireless boffins boost Wi-Fi hotspot performance 700%

Engineers at NC State University (NCSU) have discovered a way of boosting the throughput of busy WiFi networks by up to 700%. The breakthrough, called WiFox, is purely software-based, meaning it could be rolled out to existing WiFi networks relatively easily — instantly improving the throughput and latency of the network.

In a normal wireless environment, such as a cafe or airport, multiple devices trying to use the same channel can lead to sluggishness. That's often because the router gets hammered with user requests, and can't fire out the data requested promptly; instead, a backlog is built up.

What WiFox does is balance the backlog by assigning channel priority to the router depending on how much data it has to send out. That way, there's still opportunity for individual users to make requests, but the router won't get overloaded in its responses.

Improvements, the scientists say, ranged from 400 per cent with around 25 users to 700 per cent when the network was supporting the maximum number of clients. And the average response time falls by 30-40 per cent. The WiFox algorithm can easily be added by vendors' to their access point firmware, the team's leader, Arpit Gupta, a PhD student in computer science, said.

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