Frustrated mobile Internet users, you may be able to soon avoid WiFi snarls. 

WiFi providers, you may be able to boost performance of your network without having to make hardware upgrades.

So say researchers at North Carolina State who have discovered a way to boost WiFi reception by up to 700 percent, thus offering hope to Internet users and providers frustrated by crowded networks in public places and elsewhere.

The NCSU team has developed a new software called WiFox which they say can be incorporated into existing networks and boost traffic capacity. The software operates as a “traffic cop” in monitoring and moving data over the WiFi system.

“If a large number of users are submitting data requests on that channel, it is more difficult for the access point to send them back the data they requested,” NCSU noted. “Similarly, if the access point is permanently given a high priority – enabling it to override user requests in order to send out its data – users would have trouble submitting their data requests. Either way, things slow down when there is a data traffic jam on the shared channel.”

In fact, the NCSU team found in a lab test that the more users there were on a WiFi network the better the performance.

“One of the nice things about this mechanism is that it can be packaged as a software update that can be incorporated into existing WiFi networks,” says Arpit Gupta, a Ph.D. student in computer science at NCSU who is the lead author of a paper describing the work. “WiFox can be incorporated without overhauling a system.”

The paper will be presented at a conference in December.

Other co-athors were Jeongki Min, a Ph.D. student at NC State, and Dr. Injong Rhee, a professor of computer science at NC State.

Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

The study abstract:

“WiFox: Scaling WiFi Performance for Large Audience Environments”

Authors: Arpit Gupta, Jeongki Min and Injong Rhee, North Carolina State University

Presented: Dec. 10-13, ACM CoNEXT 2012 conference, Nice, France

Abstract: WiFi hotspots in locations such as airports and large conventions frequently experience poor performance in terms of downlink goodput and responsiveness. We study the various factors responsible for this performance degradation. We analyse and emulate a large conference network environment on our testbed with 45 nodes. We find that presence of asymmetry between the uplink/downlink traffic results in backlogged packets at WiFi Access Point’s (AP’s) transmission queue and subsequent packet losses. This traffic asymmetry results in maximum performance loss for such an environment along with degradation due to rate diversity, fairness and TCP behavior. We propose our solution WiFox, which (1) adaptively prioritizes AP’s channel access over competing STAs avoiding traffic asymmetry (2) provides a fairness framework alleviating the problem of performance loss due to rate-diversity/fairness and (3) avoids degradation due to TCP behavior. We demonstrate that WiFox not only improves downlink goodput by 400-700 % but also reduces request’s average response time by 30-40 %.