%0 Conference Paper
%B New Instruments of Musical Expression
%D 2014
%T Making the Most of Wifi: Optimisations for Robust Wireless Live Music Performance
%A Mitchell, Thomas
%A Madgwick, Sebastian
%A Rankine, Simon
%A Hilton, Geoffrey
%A Freed, Adrian
%A Nix Andrew
%X Wireless technology is growing increasingly prevalent in thedevelopment of new interfaces for live music performance.However, with a number of different wireless technologiesoperating in the 2.4 GHz band, there is a high riskof interference and congestion, which has the potentialto severely disrupt live performances. With its hightransmission power, channel bandwidth and throughput,Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) presents an opportunity for highlyrobust wireless communications. This paper presents ourpreliminary work to optimise the components of a Wi-Fisystem for live performance scenarios. We summarise themanufacture and testing of a prototype directional antennathat is designed to maximise sensitivity to a performer’ssignal while suppressing interference from elsewhere. Wealso propose a set of recommended Wi-Fi configurationsto reduce latency and increase throughput. Practicalinvestigations utilising these arrangements demonstratea single x-OSC device achieving a latency of <3 msand a distributed network of 15 devices achieving a netthroughput of ?4800 packets per second (?320 per device);where each packet is a 104-byte OSC message containing