Earlier this year we took to the 大象传媒鈥檚 site at the Edinburgh Festival for a public trial organised by the . Broadcasting over Wi-Fi has the potential to deliver audio, video and data to lots of people in an area simultaneously without congestion or buffering. This could allow us, for example, to offer a virtual big screen experience at an event to people on their existing phones and tablets.
Three Access Points on a mixture of 2.4 and 5 GHz frequencies were used to cover , all fed from a single hardware multicast encoder. Since the Access Points were based on consumer-grade hardware, we had to go some lengths to make them watertight courtesy of some modified plastic crates from a DIY store.
On the three evenings of our trials, members of the public were invited to join our Wi-Fi network and to download a dedicated app for the trial. This then gave them access to two streams of content, one with a special Edinburgh comedy highlights package and the second showing footage from last year鈥檚 Edinburgh Tattoo. We also asked for user feedback in the form of a short questionnaire.
While we still have a mountain of performance data to process, the initial results are encouraging and the system worked well across the wide range and number of different devices we saw (around 130 in total) over the three evenings that we trialled the system.
We have a number of possible next steps that could include examining the effect of different Forward Error Correction parameters on the performance of the system, improving the synchronisation of the video across different devices and looking at how the system would work on enterprise wireless access points as well as further lab-based tests in a controlled environment.
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