What configuration tweaks do I need to do to my Wifi base station to get minimum latency?

Question

I am developing a specialized screen sharing solutions. The requirements call for it to: a. work over Wifi LAN network, b. provide minimum latency and jitter.

I did all I know how to do in the programming side of things but see that there is great variance in both jitter and latency in different wireless networks and setup (different base stations, AdHoc vs. Managed etc.)

By trial and error I ran across base station configuration that affect latency and jitter, such as power saving mode, beacon interval and DTIM values, but would be very interested if somehow could lay down an optimal base station config options for minimum latency and jitter.

I understand of course that such optimization may very well decrease bandwidth or cause other undesired artifacts, but would still be interested to know which knobs to try pushing and what they do.

Many thanks, Gilad

Answer 1

Not really a direct answer, but I'd think that having a good wifi signal (read: access point near the host station, not many wifi networks in the area, not many wifi hosts in the network) would give much greater performance improvements than any tweak.

Also, as far as I know, while there are some really minor tweaks you could do, they are sensitive to the accesspoint/hostcard pair (results could be different with other cards) to the network status (overlapping networks, clients in the network, etc).

All in all, you will probably gain some 1-3% improvements spending lots of time carefully tuning those parameters, with an even smaller influence on the user experience - I'd say it's probably the best way to spend time and you could get better results somewhere else (like checking for other nearby networks and make sure channels don't overlap, or stuff like that).

Hope this helps.