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2024

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) Overview

In this post will lay out several facets of WiFi KPIs that I plan on diving into in greater detail in the future. I hinted at this already in my mcs_index post.

Intro

Many different areas of business and technical operations use KPIs as feedback for higher order decision makers to know if things are going well or not. In the context of commercial WiFi, the primary goal of KPIs is to find out if a customer is having trouble before a ticket lands on the help desk.

In general KPIs encompass any data relevant to the 802.11 connections. In practice this amounts to mainly RSSI, SNR, Noise Floor, Channel Utilization and throughput.

WISPr -- rXg

In this post, I will lay out some of the deeper details of configuring the rXg as a WISPr provider, intending to cover both TP-Link's Omada Pro CBC and RUCKUS's vSZ.

This will be a particularly rXg-heavy post, so if you would like to follow along at home please check out our free rXg program, where you can download and install rXg on your own hardware.

WISPr workflow

WISPr ("Wireless internet service provider roaming") is a type of hotspot setup that is cheap to deploy because all the centralized tracking of usage, as well as command and control of infrastructure, can happen in one centralized system running in a private data center. The rXg can imiplement that centralized system.

Sub natted WISPr Sites

One of the fun things I've gotten the chance to work on are WISPr sites. These are sites where a local device, usually an AP in my experience, but potentially a router or other captive portal system, puts network-joiners into a walled garden in which they can only access an External Portal Server. This server then works with the local infrastructure through some kind of controller intermediary to grant access based on purchases or any other factor it chooses.

HTTP Virtual Host

Coming from a freelance web developer background, the HTTP Virtual Host feature of the rXg was the first thing that really floored me. A lot of my prior work had do do with getting my clients' sites working on docker -based platforms like Heroku, and eventually hosting environments of my own creation and specification.

Computing the MCS Index from RF Parameters

The MCS Index is a way of comparing and ranking modulation and coding schemes within, and to some degree between, PHY(s).

MCS is an interesting thing to track because it correlates with signal quality. The higher an MCS Index that is used in a transmission, the more susceptible to interference it is going to be.

Some systems do not report MCS directly as an index however. When working with such systems, one can still compute an MCS estimate directly. Here's how.