[Make-wifi-fast] Question on Intel AX200

[Dave Taht]

Tim Higgins <tim at timhiggins.com> writes:

>>> On 9/11/2019 9:49 AM, Ben Greear wrote:
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> Does anyone know how well AX200 currently supports:
>>>>
>>>> OFDMA
>>>>
>>>> MU-MIMO (receiver)
>>>>
>>>> AP Mode
>>>>
>>>> And, can anyone suggest a good /AX AP to test against for these features?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> Ben
>>>>
>>> Hi Ben,
>>> I've been doing a lot of testing with the AX200 as a STA and
>>> sniffer, focusing on trying to see
>>> if OFDMA lives up to its advertised features. This topic is probably not of interest to this
>>> general list, so I'm happy to take the discussion to one-on-one.
>>>
>>> Tim
> I'll provide a brief summary and anyone interested can follow up directly with me.
>
> My focus is on the consumer Wi-Fi space, so I can't speak for Enterprise grade gear.
> In that space, the only products that currently have OFDMA enabled are
> the ASUS RT-AX88U (Broadcom platform),  NETGEAR RAX120 (Qualcomm
> platform) and Arris SURFboard mAX PRO and SURFboard mAX PLUS. I have
> looked at the ASUS and NETGEAR, but don't have the Arris in hand.
>
> Engenius' EWS357AP (Qualcomm platform) also has OFDMA enabled. I'm not
> sure of the state of publicly released firmware. I tried a few
> firmware versions and the results were not very good. So I've set that
> one aside for now.
>
> The ASUS has beta code that the company says supports OFDMA DL in 5
> GHz best, uplink no so much and 2.4 GHz is not stable.
>
> The NETGEAR supports OFDMA in both 2.4 and 5 GHz, but downlink only.
>
> There is no product I know of that supports DL and UL OFDMA in both bands.
>
> I've been using four Samsung S10e's as my STAs to run traffic to using
> iperf3. I also have a few Intel AX200's on ASUS mini ITX boards and
> one on an ASUS pico ITX board. Right now, the AX200 is used mainly for
> capture. Thanks to help from Johannes, I got the debug kernel
> capability working that allows capturing individual AIDs. So I can
> capture OFDMA data frames and, of course, HE management and trigger
> frames.
>
> An ongoing issue is that I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing
> when sniffing OFDMA DL and UL traffic. The DL OFDMA and UL OFDMA
> sequences described in David Coleman's Aerohive blog posts, which are
> also in the CWNA 5th Edition Study Guide that David co-authored, have
> yet to be seen.
> https://blog.aerohive.com/dl-ofdma/
> https://blog.aerohive.com/uplink-orthogonal-division-multiple-access-ul-ofdma-in-802-11ax/
>
> So I don't even know if the products I'm testing are implementing "proper" OFDMA.
>
> I've yet to see OFDMA's key features of higher efficiency and lower
> latency using simple TCP/IP traffic and ping. There are many moving
> parts on both AP and STA...this is going to take awhile to sort out.