Researchers at North Carolina State University have created new software to boost the performance of Wi-Fi connections.

Known as WiFox,the software is said to"act like a traffic cop"by monitoring how heavy data traffic is going along the channel and prioritising requests to ensure it continues to flow smoothly.

Testing has shown performance can increase by 400%when using the software on a network with 25 people trying to access the connection,but can go up by as much as 700%when the number of people hits 45.

The main benefit,however,is that it is a software solution rather than hardware.

"One of the nice things about this mechanism is that it can be packaged as a software update that can be incorporated into existing Wi-Fi networks,"said Arpit Gupta,a PhD student in computer science at the university and lead author of the WiFox paper.

"This means WiFox can be incorporated without overhauling a system,"he added.

The technology may be at its early stages,but the team behind it are going to present the paper at the ACM CoNEXT 2012 conference in Nice during December.