CueLink employs a unique technology that can drastically improve its performance when being used as a wireless Ethernet bridge for show control protocols called "Protocol-Specific Multicast Filtering".

The Problem:

Many modern Ethernet communication protocols used for show control applications rely heavily on either broadcast or multicast packets to make their data available to all points on a local area network. These packets don't contain the typical address information that Ethernet switches and routers use to properly send a packet to its one-and-only designated destination. For example, many DMX-over-Ethernet protocols broadcast the DMX updates to all addresses on the network to be sure that any DMX node that is attached to the network will be able to receive the same data.

This works well with hard-wired Ethernet networks but it causes significant problems when attempting to transmit show control data wirelessly. Imagine a network with four universes of DMX data being broadcast to the entire network. A generic wireless Ethernet bridge would see the broadcast packets and attempt to transmit them because it cannot determine if the equipment at the remote site needs the data or not.

CueLink's Unique Solution:

A unique feature of CueLink is that it comes with built-in knowledge of many popular show control protocols. A user can ask CueLink to only attempt to broadcast DMX universes 2 & 3 of the four available. Since the wireless segment of a local network will almost always have more limited bandwidth than the hard-wired segments, it's important to be able to optimize which protocols, information and specific messages should be allowed to pass through the air.

In it's initial release, CueLink already understands several lighting control protocols and lighting console messaging schemes with more protocols and media types coming soon.

Without this show control specific filtering, generic wireless Ethernet access points can easily become saturated by other broadcast or multicast network traffic that is not needed by the wireless segments of the network. The problems caused by overloading a wireless link in a show control system could be disasterous - resulting in sluggish performance or even lost control information.