Wavion, an Israel-based manufacturer of Wi-Fi base stations, has a new GPS-enabled solution (PDF) to measure the coverage and throughput of its WBS-2400 base stations. Called the Wavion Coverage Tool (WCT), the solution enables service providers to optimize the location of base stations in order to provide the best Wi-Fi access possible.
How Does The Wavion Coverage Tool Work?
The WCT requires a software installation on the measurement and base station sides. The measurement tool can be installed on any Pentium VI Windows 2000 or XP laptop with at least 512 MB RAM, 1 GB of disk space and 4 USB ports. However only 2 USB ports need to be free–one for an included USB GPS receiver and another for an included USB Wi-Fi client. Google Earth will also have to be installed in order to see a visual representation of the results.
On the base station side, a traffic-generating IPERF client is loaded onto another laptop. The IPERF client is a network testing tool that creates TCP and UDP data streams and then measures the throughput of the networks carrying them.
Once everything is hooked up, a tester drives around the area of the base station with the initial laptop and a magnetic omni-directional antenna attached to the top of the vehicle. As the vehicle drives, the measurement tool on the mapping laptop picks up the coverage and throughput at each point. The GPS receiver simultaneously finds the vehicle’s location at each measured point and then crunches the data and plots it on a Google Earth image.
Okay, So What’s The Point?
Wavion is marketing the Wavion Coverage Tool as not only a way to optimize the location of Wi-Fi base stations by choosing areas with the best data transfer efficiency, but also to monitor the efficiency of established base stations. Finally, service providers also have hard data that can be used in marketing campaigns to pitch the effectiveness of their Wi-Fi service.