[Make-wifi-fast] mesh deployment with ath9k driver changes

[Pete Heist <pete@eventide.io>]

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I have a 7 node (3 of which are repeaters) mesh deployed at a campground using Open Mesh’s 6.4 beta (with LEDE and the ath9k changes). I set up an internal SmokePing instance with each AP as a target, and the first guests of the season are arriving (school kids, the best testers). The setup for our three repeaters is:

Cabin 12: 110 meters and RSSI -69 to gateway, NLOS through a few leaves
Cabin 20: 65 meters and RSSI -66 to gateway, LOS but maybe some fresnel zone intrusion from leaves or branches
Cabin 28: 50 meters and RSSI -51 to gateway, clear LOS

Attached are some PDFs of the current SmokePing results. The school arrived Monday morning and are mostly clustered around cabins 12 and 20, with a few around cabin 28, can you tell? :) Mean ping time for cabin 12 is around 200 ms during “active use”, with outliers above 1 second, which is higher than expected. I don’t have data collected on how many active users that is and what they’re doing, but there could be 40-50 students around the cabin 12 AP, with however many active "as is typical for kids”.

I wonder how much of this is due to the NLOS situation for Cabin 12. But with no load, ping times don’t fluctuate much above a few ms. This weekend, I should have the first cluster of users around Cabin 28 (with clear LOS) to compare it to.

Overall it would be nice to know, in a typical real-world setup, how much is WiFi latency is due to bufferbloat, and how much to the physical layer?

Lastly, is there any interest in access to SmokePing results, or other diagnostics? Things are bound to get interesting as the season progresses…


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