802.11 Reference Design: Resources

Wireshark

​Wireshark is a tool for capturing and analyzing all kinds of network traffic. On PCs with supported Wi-Fi NICs Wireshark can use ​monitor mode to capture and analyze all 802.11 traffic, including control and management frames. This is very useful for analyzing and debugging interactions among 802.11 nodes and a WARP node running the 802.11 Reference Design.

In our experience Wireshark works very well on OS X machines. Monitor mode is supported on most newer Macs. We have used it successfully with the integrated 802.11 interfaces on 2010 and 2013 MacBook Pros.

Based on the Wireshark docs, monitor mode is also supported on Linux machines, but not Windows. We have not tried either platform.

The ​AirPcap devices claim to enable monitor mode capture on Windows. We haven't tried these.

802.11 Devices

The 802.11 Reference Design should work with any device that implements 802.11g. We obviously can't guarantee this, given the enormous variety of devices out there.

For the majority of our testing during development we used Linksys WRT54GL with the ​Tomato firmware. With the right cable/adapter (RP-TNC - SMA) and sufficient attenuation (>50dB) the WRT54GL can be connected directly to the WARP v3 node RF interface. The Tomato firmware also enables forcing the Tx rate of the WRT54GL (some versions of the Linksys firmware may support this as well). Eliminating interference and forcing the Tx rate greatly simplify PHY debugging. In our experience even when connected directly a nearby laptop running Wireshark can still capture most frames being exchanged between the WRT54GL and WARP node.

Oscilloscope

The 802.11 Reference Design routes a number of useful MAC/PHY signals to the WARP v3 debug header. These signals can be observed in real-time with an oscilloscope (probably also with a fast-running self-clocked logic analyzer; we haven't tried this).