Making the Most of Wifi: Optimisations for Robust Wireless Live Music Performance

Title	Making the Most of Wifi: Optimisations for Robust Wireless Live Music Performance
Publication Type	Conference Paper
Year of Publication	2014
Authors	Mitchell, Thomas [1], Madgwick Sebastian [2], Rankine Simon [3], Hilton Geoffrey [4], Freed Adrian [5], and Andrew Nix [6]
Conference Name	New Instruments of Musical Expression
Abstract	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