Ruckus Wireless has rolled out its Zap wireless performance testing program to the open source community to encourage further development of advanced testing tools that provide a better understanding of actual wireless network performance.
The company said that the Zap is a wireless performance measurement utility designed to determine wireless network signal performance accurately over time, space and frequency. It was originally developed by Ruckus engineers to characterise wireless behavior of real-time IP-based video streaming applications.
According to Ruckus Wireless, Zap allows network planners test sustained throughput of an existing wireless network and determine the true, sustained and worst-case performance that it is capable of delivering 99.5% of the time. It also helps organisers to predict the real-life performance of a system before deployment.
Ruckus said that Zap works by sending controlled bursts of packets and measuring both packet loss and inter-arrival times. By measuring the maximum throughput of batches of packets, it is able to determine the minimum throughput that can be expected at a given percentile. It provides a statistical analysis that anticipates the performance of a wireless network by predicting the percent of time and the locations at which performance will be above or below a certain limit.
Bill Kish, chief technology officer and co-founder of Ruckus Wireless, said: With wireless you need to understand the statistical throughput distribution in order to really characterise performance. Zap gives you that. Other performance testing tools only tell you average throughput, which is often irrelevant to demanding applications.
“As good as Zap is, by releasing the code as open source, we believe the software community can make it even better, perhaps even incorporate it into new commercial testing tools. Wi-Fi is becoming a critical network access infrastructure and anything that shines a brighter light onto Wi-Fi performance is a good thing for the industry.
