[homenet] ISIS wifi testing

[Mikael Abrahamsson <[e-mail]>]

Hello.

I have spent a large chunk of today doing wifi testing with the quagga 
implementation of homenet isis. 
https://plus.google.com/110006881111138232905/posts/UwYS9h2n7eM

I have been using iperf3 sending 2 megabit/s of UDP:

iperf3 -l 1400 -R -u -b 10M -t 6000 -c 10.0.58.140

The setup is that I set up a WDR4900 with one connection to the Internet 
(not really relevant), and one wired connection to an Ubuntu machine. I 
then set up two additional WDR4900 on my sons tricycle, plus a laptop.

           +----W1-----+R1
C1 +----+R3            +
           +            +
           +----W0-----+R2+---+C2

C1-R3, R2-C2, R1-R2 are wired connections.

W0 is 5GHz radio.
W1 is 2.4GHz radio.

I'm running all radios at 10mW.

If I position the setup just outside the room the R3 is located in, W0 has 
better SNR and lower metric, and is thus used. As I move further away from 
R3, W1 will start to get better SNR compared to W0, as W0 is degrading 
more per physical distance compared to W1.

Generally I only see very little packet loss as long as at least one of 
the radios has decent radio performance. I can go back and forth between 
W0 and W1 being the best radio with usually just 0-10 packets lost out of 
893 packets per second, usually it's 0-3.

I spent part of the day doing testing between laptop and a VM on my normal 
laptop, but I just in the past hour discovered that this VM causes packet 
loss. I replaced it with another computer and now all the spurious packet 
loss I was seeing before even using cable, is gone.

So this is a very simple setup, and it's also loop-free at least in one 
direction, traffic R3->C2 is loop-free either via R2 and R1, whereas 
R2->C1 can loop at R1 until R1 has converged its routing table due to a 
change received from R2.

Also, the above UDP test is only in one direction. How should I record 
the testing, should I have two sessions, one in each direction, and just 
log the results to file, so we see per-second result of packets 
sent/received and packet delay variance (iperf3 will give a value there).

I mean, from setting up everything and then just powering it up and moving 
it around, it basically "just works". I can move the rig out of coverage, 
it'll connect and start working as soon as the radios are up, and when 
there is a lower SNR radio, it'll move to it without any major packet 
loss.

I could for instance make a screen shot video of 10 minutes of testing 
with all the values scrolling, on the screen including the homenet web 
"bubble" diagram in the corner somewhere, and "ip monitor" running so the 
metrics can be seen continously.

Suggestions for tests greatly appreciated.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: [e-mail]