Measuring the Performance of Your Wi-Fi Network

So you have just installed a WiFi network in your small business or a café. You will typically then need to measure how good your WiFi network is performing. The specifications of an 802.11b WiFi network only tell you the maximum throughput is 11 Mbps. As the saying goes, 'your mileage may vary'. So comes up your need of what is your achievable throughput. You may need to quantify the performance of your WiFi network in business terms.

The place where you have placed your PCs and wireless access point may have some effect on the actual speed of your WiFi network. In any case, a rudimentary WiFi network performance measurement tool is built into Windows. If you double click the network icon in the system tray you will get a Wireless Network Connection Status screen. Here it tells you the signal strength and speed but you will notice that the speed is the maximum throughput possible, not the actual speed you are experiencing.

There are some third party tools available for you to give you a more accurate measurement of your response time and throughput. One such tool is QCheck from IxiaCom (www.ixiacom.com). It is free. Run QCheck on each PC on the network and gather performance results from each of them. Then move the base station and the PCs, and perform the QCheck again. So you can know how much of a difference your actions are making on the WiFi throughput.

You install the QCheck endpoint on every PC while you track your results from a QCheck console. QCheck works by sending out data from one PC to another, then the receiving PC sends the data back to the originating PC, and QCheck measures the time taken for the round trip, and calculates the throughput.

There are other tests available in QCheck as well: A response time test produces the maximum, minimum, and average time taken to complete any particular transaction. A streaming test produces the rate at which stream data gets received by the endpoint and the rate of packet loss that occurs during the process. A traceroute test gives you the number of hops, the address of each hop, and the average hop latency.

Do not stop with taking a single set of measurements. Wireless networks are fickle and you can find lot of differences in performance measurements made in different points of time. So measure all the factors in regular intervals over a period of time - say once every hour. This will help you arrive at a baseline set of figures that you can use to show to your management.

Note that QCheck is not limited to measuring WiFi networks - in fact you can measure the performance of any network with it.

You can use other tools also to check the performance of your WiFi network. iPerf is one such tool. It is open source, free, and available for all operating systems. You can find the download link by searching the net. iPerf consists of two components, which are an iPerf server and an iPerf client. iPerf is more of a command line tool, but there is a Java-based GUI available for it, called JPerf.

There are a few more tools for measuring performance of WiFi networks. These are NetSurveyor and Netio (search for the download links). Both have helpful manuals with them, and by following the instructions given in them you should be able to measure your WiFi performance.