WiFox claims 700% boost in Wi-Fi performance

Researchers at North Carolina State University have created new software to boost the performance of Wi-Fi connections.

Known as WiFox, the software is said to “act like a traffic cop” by monitoring how heavy data traffic is going along the channel and prioritising requests to ensure it continues to flow smoothly.

Testing has shown performance can increase by 400% when using the software on a network with 25 people trying to access the connection, but can go up by as much as 700% when the number of people hits 45.

The main benefit, however, is that it is a software solution rather than hardware.

“One of the nice things about this mechanism is that it can be packaged as a software update that can be incorporated into existing Wi-Fi networks,” said Arpit Gupta, a PhD student in computer science at the university and lead author of the WiFox paper.

“This means WiFox can be incorporated without overhauling a system,” he added.

The technology may be at its early stages, but the team behind it are going to present the paper at the ACM CoNEXT 2012 conference in Nice during December.