[Make-wifi-fast] graphing airtime fairness in wifi

[Isaac Konikoff]

Metageek's eye p.a. tool does something similar for all stations in the 
pcap.
http://www.metageek.com/products/eye-pa/

It also does the tree-pie graphs and lets you view the packets for a 
particular conversation and export filtered views back to wireshark.

The only negatives I've found is that its analyze tab only appears to 
work on ht20 channels where the center frequency and channel frequency 
are the same and it chokes on large captures...maybe I just need more 
memory. But it is useful for visualizing wtf is going on wifi-wise as 
well as what rates and when certain stations are transmitting at and 
what some protocols are doing like 11r roaming.

You can get a short trial license, but I would ask them if they would 
donate a FBO make-wifi-fast license.

Isaac

On 04/18/2016 03:35 PM, Dave Taht wrote:
> I have been sitting here looking at wifi air packet captures off and
> on for years now, trying to come up with a representation, over time,
> of what the actual airtime usage (and one day, fairness) would look
> like. Believe me, looking at the captures is no fun, and (for example)
> wireshark tends to misinterpret unreceived retries at different rates
> inside a txop as tcp retries (which, while educational, makes it hard
> to see actual retries)...
>
> Finally today, I found a conceptual model that "fits" - and it's kind
> of my hope that something already out there does this from packet
> captures. (?) Certainly there are lots of great pie chart tools out
> there...
>
> Basically you start with a pie chart representing a fixed amount of
> time - say, 128ms. Then for each device transmitting you assign a
> slice of the pie for the amount of airtime used. Then, you can show
> the amount of data transmitted in that piece of the pie by increasing
> the volume plotted for that slice of the pie. And you sweep around
> continually (like a radar scanning or a timepiece's pointer) to show
> progress over time, and you show multicast and other traffic as eating
> the whole pie for however long it lasts.
>
> conceptually it looks a bit like this:
>
> http://blog.cerowrt.org/images/fairness.png  (I borrowed this graph
> from  http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/11/easily-create-stunning-animated-charts-with-chart-js/
> )
>
> Another way to do it would be to have the pie represent all the
> stations on the network, and to have the "sweep hand" jump between
> them...
>
>
>

-- 
Isaac Konikoff
Candela Technologies
konikofi at candelatech.com
Office: 360-380-1618
Mobile: 360-389-2453