Improved Wi-Fi air utilisation

A method for operating a wireless access point 102 in a Wireless Local Area Network, WLAN, where a sequence of data packets are received with an interarrival time between the data packets greater than a frame aggregation threshold. The frame aggregation threshold is the time interval within which data packets received by a Wi-FiRTM driver (within the Wi-Fi Interface 208) in the access point will be aggregated into a single data packet before transmission over Wi-Fi. Successive received data packets are stored in a buffer 204 and forwarded to the Wi-Fi driver with a total time interval between each forwarded data packet less than the frame aggregation threshold. As a result, the forwarded data packets are transmitted by the Wi-Fi driver in an aggregated frame. Forwarding of the data packets can occur once the buffer has been filled to a certain limit (of data packets), and where the limit can be adjusted according to a measure of the Wi- Fi air utilisation. The data packets may be received (from the internet/WAN 106) at the access point as a multicast stream (corresponding to a video stream) and forwarded (to a wireless device 104) over the wireless local area network as a unicast stream. An aim of the invention is to better utilise Wi-Fi frame aggregation, and send multiple data packets as an aggregated packet, e.g. an aggregated MAC protocol data unit, A-MPDU, to reduce the overhead of the RTS/CTS/BlkAck to data ratio.