In case anyone's interested, I resolved this problem by putting a 
wireless router (WRT54GS with DD-WRT) on top of the robot setup as a 
bridge instead of using the robot's built-in wireless.

-Dan

On 4/9/10 2:34 PM, Dan Lazewatsky wrote:
> Hi all -
> This isn't strictly a ROS question, but I was hoping people here would
> have some thoughts. I'm grabbing video off a webcam on my robot and
> using image transport to stream it to another computer on the same
> wireless network. I'm having a problem where shortly after I start
> subscribing to messages, my network latency skyrockets (like 1000ms+
> ping times for computers on the same network, and bit rate on the
> robot's wifi connection goes down to 1Mb/s from 54Mb/s). I had fixed
> this problem a while ago by letting the router choose which channel to
> use, but the problem came back and I haven't had any luck fixing it.
> It's not a signal strength issue - iwconfig shows a link quality of
> 90/100 or better. Any suggestions as to what might be going on would be
> much appreciated.
>
> (I'm using a WRT54GS with DD-WRT)
>
> Thanks,
> -Dan
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