Wireless Access

Hi,

Just wondering about some sort of metric to measure the 'performance' of the wireless?  We have a customer who is insisting on having something that can be written into Service Level Agreements etc.  This metric should be something that can be measured using the existing controllers and Airwave as we don't want to go down the path, and expense, of having some utility installed on all clients etc.

The 7.4.x version of Airwave has an interesting figure of goodput in the client stats, which could be something that can be used.  But what about idle clients and their resulting goodput?

Anyone have any advice on how to do this, or what method used when validating a deployment?

Thanks

One tool you can use to measure client performance is iperf / Jperf. It is a well know network performance tool available for free download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/iperf/ It can be run on Windows and Mac clients. It can perform TCP and UDP throughput tests.

It will give you a good measure of the peak client performance but you should expect some variation between different client types. For example a 2x2 2 SS client will perform better than a 1x2 2SS client. Different vendor chipsets will also show different performance. I suggest you do some baselineing with the clients you have to give you an idea of what to expect. Whilst you can view the performance on the iperf server (you need to run iperf on the clients and communicate back to an iperf server on the LAN) you should also be able to see the client throughput on Airwave after a few minutes. Airwave typically takes 5 minutes to gather client throughput data updates. 

I often use iperf to validate an install. If there were any sort of interference problems or Wifi issues you would notice by eratic or lower client performance than normal.

Hope this hepls.

Regards,

Mark

You can also get iPerf from the Android Market.

Too bad there is no free iPhone version.

Iperf and jperf are great.

I have found the app "WifiPerf" to be ok for iDevices if you have to test to or from one and it is only a few bucks.

It uses iperf3 which is a bit of pain if you dont have a mac for the wired side. I wasn't able to find an iperf3 windows package anywhere but the linux builds work well.

When logging into the controller via GUI, on the dashboard shows for APs 'Overall Goodput'.

This is the figure I need, which can't seem to get out of Airwave.

Is there a way to extract this from the controller so that I can graph it over time?  Is there an snmp or cli command that might give me this info?

Thanks

iPerf (and its other various forms) I have used as well and liked them a lot. A few years ago I got ahold of QCheck from Ixia. It's a nice little free tool as well but has a nice little GUI as opposed to being CLI. It has packages for Windows (32 an 64 bit), Mac and Linux (also 32 and 64 bit flavors).

There is an end point client for Android but I have not seen one for iPad / iPhone.

Michael,

I am the counder of a startup that offers an app based service that is focused on measuring wireless carrier performance and "PLA's" Performance level agreements (like an SLA on the wireline side).

If you are still looking for a solution I would love to schedule a call.

Our web site is www.mobilepulse.com

My number is 720-283-0417.

Cheers,

Christine Ekman

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