Isn’t Wifi a great thing? Especially when your carrier doesn’t offer unlimited. Now imagine you have your laptop, phone and tablet connected to the internet. Now what if you have family over, well it is almost the holiday season so that is bound to happen, and they bring their laptops and want to use your Wifi? You probably won’t tell them no. But your router is going to have a hard time giving bandwidth to all the devices connected, without some of those devices crawling on the network. That’s where these students’ work comes in.
Students at NC State have invented some software called “WiFox” which just sits on the router that monitors how much traffic the network demands from it. Now when there’s a backlog of traffic, the router basically tells all the devices on the network to leave it alone for a second while it pushes out all the current requests it’s been given. This is done instead of having devices fight over which devices gets packets first.
While testing, the students found out that when there is 25 people connected to the same Wifi network they saw a 400% improvement. With 45 people connected at the same time, that bumped up to 700%.
So if these students can get WiFox put onto most routers out-of-the-box, that would make it much easier for many people who have multiple devices connected to their router. Also manufacturers only have to issue an update to your router to enable WiFox support. Then all you have to do is hit install, it’ll be just that easy. Now could this be put in place on a cellular network? Probably not as they use a different protocol, but it would be cool if this could be used on Verizon, or even T-Mobile’s network so we can all get faster speeds during peak times.
What do you think of all of this? Pretty cool right? I’d be willing to install this WiFox software onto my router, but I’d want to test it first before I mess up my router and Wifi network, what about you?
Source: NC State