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KPI

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.

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.