You are employed as a Wireless Network Engineer by a leading shopping mall company called ShopEz to provide WLAN coverage for the planned hotspots inside the mall. You have the option to provide the hotspots in the mall by using only either the 802.11b or 802.11g WLAN Access Points (APs). Some of the hotspots are to provide Open access authentication while others need to provide shared key authentication to customers who pay a fee.
ShopEz mall wants to provide hotspot access from each of the APs with a minimum throughput of 1 Mbps in its coverage area. This minimum throughput would also be sufficient for the shoppers to gain access to multimedia services locally as well as over the Internet.
An important question that you need to study experimentally is to determine the variation in the average throughput experienced by the client device(s) vs distance in meters from the AP. In order, to get a good estimate of the throughput at different distances from the AP you need to measure the throughput in four different directions i.e. with client devices antenna directly in Line of Sight of the AP, the client devices antenna at 90 degrees (deg.) from AP, at 180 deg. from AP and at 270 deg. from the AP. The throughput needs to be measured for two different packet sizes i.e. 500 bytes and 1470 bytes.
As this is an indoor environment so the RF propagation characteristics also come into play. So, a proper choice of either the 802.11b or 802.11g available WLANs also needs to be made along with suitable antennas in the final network.
ShopEz mall is on a tight schedule and budget so you need to quickly create a small testbed using open source tools and software to measure the throughput vs range from AP. You have been told by the IT department of the mall that in the past they have used Iperf tool to emulate the generation of UDP network traffic and Wireshark to sniff the packets.
You should determine the throughput vs range in meters from the AP time for UDP traffic generated first for a packet size of 500 bytes and then 1470 bytes.
You need to repeat the above study for APs using a shared secure key and for the same two packet sizes and compare the results with the corresponding results obtained for open access authentication system. From the comparison of the results an important question that you need to analyze is if the throughput vs range performance is influenced by shared key authentication.
Tools needed to do the experiment
-iperf / jperf
-Wireshark
-Client
-Server
-Access Point
-Ethernet cable
I need to show the throughput vs. range graph which is generated using iperf / jperf tool for packet sizes 500 bytes and 1470 bytes.
Iperf / jperf is a tool which generates UDP/TCP traffic for fixed packet sizes.
Measurement that need to be taken are: Throughput vs. range graph without security for packet sizes 500 and 1470 bytes.
Throughput vs. range graph with security (WPA/WPA 2) for packet sizes 500 and 1470 bytes. So, there will be 4 measurements.
Range should be roughly up to 60 m… like 5m, 10m, 20m, 30m, 40m, 50m and 60m.