MIT Experts Develop Wi-Fi Sharing With No Video Buffering

MT experts successfully developed a way on how Wi-Fi sharing can be done without the streaming video buffering problems.

Finally, Wi-Fi sharing no longer has to be burdensome with all the buffering, skips and ugly pixelations that usually come as the primary result. Thanks to the group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology experts who paved the way for the said discovery.

A recent report revealed that experts from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has just developed and unveiled the Minerva system. Minerva system is an untraditional way of Wi-Fi distribution among users under the same connection.

How it works

Minerva system works by analyzing every video even before actually playing them. Through prior analyzing, the video is measured on how much it gets affected should it be played at a lower resolution.

Minerva, the Wi-Fi sharing with no video buffering solution that the MIT experts discovered works by breaking the tradition of Wi-Fi sharing. It does not equally divide the bandwidth among the videos simultaneously played over one Wi-Fi connection but it distributes the bandwidth depending on which can afford to have a lower amount without compromising the video quality.

Where is the Minerva system useful

A usual scenario in a household with families sharing one Wi-Fi connection, a cartoon video on a smartphone can hurt the video quality of HD sports match on TV. That is primarily because an HD sport is a fast-moving video that requires a higher amount of bandwidth than the cartoons which does not.

However, since the two videos are given the equal amount of bandwidth, the cartoon is played at a bandwidth amount exceeding its usual need while the HD sports video suffers from using below what it requires. This is where the Minerva system works by analyzing the videos first before the bandwidth allocation.

Aside from bringing a solution to the usual household Wi-Fi sharing with video buffering, Minerva system also works with wider internet connections. It can be for companies such as Netflix that is serving a bigger market.

Speed effect and hardware requirements

As per the tests, the Minerva system reduced the rebuffering speed of videos under shared Wi-Fi by almost 50 percent. The good news is, this Wi-Fi sharing system that reduces video buffering does not require any hardware change to users at all.