Figure 2: Upper Level Test Locations
The lower-level corner office is not the best location for placing a wireless router or access point for whole-house coverage, but serves the purpose well for pushing products to their limits. Note that the orientations of the icons for the AP and notebooks in Figures 1and 2 are significant. Unlike the previous test methodology that always pointed the client adapter antenna toward the AP under test, the notebook carrying the client adapter under test is now oriented as a user would naturally do in each location. Here are descriptions of the five test locations:
- Location #1: AP and wireless client in same room, approximately 6 feet apart.
- Location #2: Client in room on same level, approximately 45 feet away from AP. Two sheetrock walls between AP and Client.
- Location #3: Client in upper level, approximately 25 feet away (direct path) from AP. One wood floor, sheetrock ceiling, no walls between AP and Client.
- Location #4: Client on upper level, approximately 55 feet away (direct path) from AP. Two to three interior walls, one wood floor, one sheetrock ceiling and stainless-steel refrigerator, between AP and Client.
- Location #5: Client on upper level, approximately 65 feet away (direct path) from AP. Four to five interior walls, one wood floor, one sheetrock ceiling, between AP and Client.
While you might think that Location 5 is the most difficult, Location 4 turned out to be the toughest. I suspect this is due to the combination of antenna orientation, stainless-steel clad appliances close by, and the desktop test location being sunken about 6 inches below an adjoining quartz-composite countertop.
Test Description
Ixia's IxChariot network peformance evaluation program is used with the test configuration shown in Figure 3 to run tests in each of the five locations. The test notebook is usually a Dell Insprion 4100 with a 1GHz Celeron processor, 576MB of memory, and running WinXP Home SP2 with the latest updates. The Ethernet client machine is usually an HP Pavilion 716n with a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 processor, 504MB of memory, also running WinXP Home SP2 with the latest updates. The test machines have no other applications running during testing.
