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Ask Slashdot: 802.11n Bake-Off Test Plans?
First time accepted submitter Richard_13 writes "I am seeking a bake-off test plan for an enterprise size deployment of 802.11n wireless. We are about to go to tender for a large scale deployment of 802.11n controllers and APs — and I need a bake-off (benchmarking) test plan that is focused on testing the *maximum number* of clients that an AP can handle before it falls over, in addition to the throughput for each client. We intend to test the latest products from the major vendors, Aruba, Cisco, HP, Xirrus, Ruckus, etc.; not consumer products like Linksys, D-Link or Netgear. Any bake-off test plans or useful links to multi-vendor wireless focused web sites would be greatly appreciated."
Just say "benchmarking" and you won't need to explain that "bake-off" means "benchmarking". Wait, what was the question?
Call a meeting of the competitors engineers. It's important you get them all in the room at one time with not too much advance warning of the topic.
Tell them what you think you want. Ask them as a group what you're missing. Then make them as a group come up with an eval plan and cook 'em off according to the plan they come up with.
If you need an independent judge, go to one of the labs that does independent third-party assurance and contract them to provide oversight.
Disclaimer: I've worked for one of those labs for the past 15 years.
Stand back and watch the fun......
Red
We have a box that can emulate up to 128 stations, including wpa, wpa2, etc. It can do
DHCP or static IPs and generate Ethernet, udp, tcp, http, and other higher level protocols,
including IPv6. Multiple systems can be clustered together for additional throughput and
radios. Each system can run on only one channel at once, but can talk to multiple APs
on that channel.
One of our systems can saturate any of the consumer grade APs we have, and some folks have
used it to stress very big systems (conference centers, etc).
Runs on Linux of course!
http://www.candelatech.com/ct520-128_product.php
Thanks,
Ben Greear
Cisco's WLC/LWAPs do load balancing among access points.
See here
Trolling is a art,
Maybe you could hold a bake sale and offer free wifi for all your customers. Just give them places to sit.
In my somewhat limited(but rather painful) experience with attempting to use wifi as a serious connection, one of the issues that cropped up a lot was less with throughput, or with number of clients; but with client software behavior in the face of a glitch.
Dicking around at home and the wifi cuts out for a second? Reload the webpage and quit your whining.
Running your basic "enterprise" client configuration(documents directory is actually on a fileserver, authentication through AD, etc, etc.) and the wifi cuts out? Be prepared for frustratingly erratic appearances of apparently disappearing documents, authentication fails, not automatically reconnecting to the fileserver, Finder just twiddling its thumbs and thinking about infinity until that server either times out or comes back, etc, etc.
Even before any APs show up, you can start identifying the likely areas of sheer pain by using netem, switch jiggery-pokery, or just a $20 consumer AP and flicking your laptop's RF power switch: If your environment has client applications that don't play nicely if the network goes all to suck for a second or two from time to time, wifi deployment is going to be Fun.
Honestly, for most applications where wifi isn't a totally terrible idea(ie. heavily throughput dependent stuff), that would be the big focus of my testing(along with how useful the management tools and interfaces are). High throughput is far less valuable than stable connections.