Optimizing wireless latency and jitter in a controlled environment

Hi everyone.

I'm building an ad-hoc monitoring system for my band, and I'm seeking lowest latency and jitter possible for an isolated wireless environment.

I am aware that the combination of "wireless" and "low latency" may be (oxy)moronic :slight_smile: but I understand the limitations, and I've tried overcoming most of them. I will explain.

We're using Sonobus software on 3 Android phones to stream real-time audio via 5GHz WiFi (at most 3m distance from the AP) from a laptop that is connected to the Xiaomi AX3200 router/AP via CAT 5e cable. The router itself is disconnected from the internet. The laptop is connected to a high-speed audio interface with <2ms audio buffer, and Android phones are using Android audio output directly with <3ms audio buffers.
We've turned off all unnecessary data sending and turned down bandwidth to 96kbps per device.

Throughout our testing, the network latency is around 15-25 ms, and 10 ms jitter buffer is needed to avoid underruns. All of that adds up to ~40 ms delay, which is very distracting during live performance.
In my experience recording music, 10-15 ms could be acceptable. So the network here is definitely the bottleneck.

I have used OpenWRT in the past, but not very deeply. I was wondering if there are any less-known options in OpenWRT I can tweak to somehow get better latency and jitter, particularly in the scenario where there are fixed number of known devices, and I have complete control of all of them and can make custom tweaks?

I'd be very grateful for any idea.

Cheers!

You can use DSCP markings to set audio packets into wifi voice class (or video at least) https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8325#section-4.3

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Only other thing I can think of is check what the airtime is actually doing by doing packet captures in monitor mode.

As well as maybe you can tweak the AQL wireless stuff too? But diffserv sounds like a good point. Main thing I thought which creates issues with real time applications such as wireless audio is that you have a whole bunch of small packets? As you've stated above you have small buffers? So if you have something else try to do a big packet it creates contention issues?

Keep in mind that the airwaves aren't likely to be clean and free of interference at most venues, with hundreds/ thousands of visitors and lots of weird (other) technology…

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