Hi all,

Dave Täht suggested that I post the discussion we've started to this broader group.

I've been spending the past few months trying to develop methods to verify one of the key promises of OFDMA; improved efficiency.
The tests have mostly focused on trying to see improvement in total throughput using various traffic mixes using four OFDMA STAs.

I've been using Samsung S10e's as STAs and primarily iperf3 TCP/IP and UDP traffic.  I did some work with the Intel AX200 as a STA using both Windows 10 and Linux for RvR testing and found the Linux driver basically broken for uplink. (See the Win10/Linux comparison in the RAX40 section of https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-reviews/33220-wi-fi-6-performance-roundup-five-routers-tested?start=1
So, for now, I'm limited to using the Samsung S10 as STAs.

ANYWAY, I haven't been having much luck finding total throughput gains, so thought I'd bang my head against a different wall for awhile, which brings me to latency.

My initial work was pretty simple, just running pings to four OFDMA STAs with OFDMA on/off on the AP, which showed no improvement. That's once I realized the large ping times and variation I was seeing initially was due to aggressive power-save kicking in on the STAs with no traffic running. So I also tried various TCP rates starting at 1 Mbps per STA to keep the STA awake.

Coincidentally, Dave reached out the other day and suggested I look at the toolsets used for the make-wifi-fast project. 

I've spent a few hours looking at the flent and rrul sites and  I'm interested in exploring using the tools/techniques used for the make-wifi-fast work to date to see if AX adds anything to the latency improvement party.  If anyone is willing to provide some pointers on the proper use of the tools, I'd appreciate it.

For example, I didn't see mention of the bitrates used for the traffic streams in the tests. Do I just tell each stream to run full blast (1 Gbps)?

Also, since most implementations of (consumer at least) OFDMA require multiple STAs to trigger OFDMA frames, I could use some help understanding whether multiple streams should be applied per STA, or spread among the 4 STAs I'm using in my testing.

Also (2), has anyone used Android STAs for make-wifi-fast testing?

Anyway, thanks for reading. I look forward to any advice the group can provide.

Tim Higgins
SmallNetBuilder.com