Ping Spikes on Wireless lan..

lazygit

Ok so the story is:

In my gaff we have a load of pc's and cables every where!
So we decided to go wireless on a few of the PC's as a test.

I bought 3 wireless USB cards from maplin.

Stuck one in an Windows XP box with a normal wired network card to connect us to the rest of the network and setup a network bridge instead of using an Access Point

I then put the other cards in random PC's that arnt connected to the existing wired network.

I setup all the Wireless cards in ad hoc mode.

All the PC's can see each other and everything is cool except for the fact that every 60 seconds or so there is a ping spike of about 3000ms on the Wireless PC's. This of course is fine for just normal web browsing, but for games its a no no...

So what im wondering is:

Is this been caused by the USB cards, would PCI wireless cards fix the problem.

Is it the Network bridge that is causing the problem? would a wireless access point fix this. There is not a lot of traffic traveling over the bridge, not enough to cause a 3000ms spike. ( One of the guys on boards is selling an Access Point and before i buy it i want to make sure it fixes the problem )

Is this a common thing for wireless networks? All the cards report 100% signal strength, and we are not moving the PC around the place.

BigEejit

Do you know anyone else with an access point? can you borrow it? ...
Other than that, a 3 sec latency may be something timing out/going to sleep and coming back to life, especially if it happens VERY reguarly (like every 60 seconds exactly) ... check settings on the bridge first, traffic will stop if the gateway disappears ......

lazygit

No if i knew someone with an access point i would test it!

I thought the USB cards might be going asleep allright! did not really play with the bridge settings .. but i dont think there are to many things to configure

murph

I don't have much practice with practical applications of wireless networking (still a poor student and can't afford the hardware...) but I'd guess the periodic spikes could be something to do with the routing protocol being used.
AODV maintains it's routing tables by sending out a periodic update message. This could be causing the spikes.
I don't know how but if you can change the routing protocol to DSR it should eliminate this problem...

lynchie

I know somebody who had a similar problem with USB cards. Cant remember what the solution was but ill try to find out for ya.

lynchie

The problem my mate had was with XP. With Buffalo or Smartbridges USB units, every 60 seconds they were either getting a high ping or a dropped packet. Their solution was to disable the "Wireless Zero Configuration Service" and use only the configuration application supplied by the vendor

lazygit

Thanks for the help everyone.... it was the Wireless Zero Configuration service.

Once i disabled it on the Network bridge there were no more timeouts