Troubleshooting Wireless Home Networks Using a Portable Testbed

Abstract

Because of the recent advances in wireless technologies and, consequently the fast growing number of wireless devices that are being deployed in consumer houses, there is a growing demand from manufacturers to develop and deploy tools able to diagnose problems and evaluate the performance of their products prior to releasing them to the market. Such testing tools are required to be quickly deployable in real-life home environments and should support various wireless technologies and use cases. In order to avoid future product service failures and costly complex troubleshooting, the results should offer a full understanding of the product behavior on the field. Different approaches able to fulfill these objectives have been proposed in literature. In this paper, we propose a new portable and highly flexible testbed tool to evaluate the performance of wireless devices in consumer houses. Furthermore we demonstrate the feasibility and operation of the testbed in two real-life home environments for assessing the impact of range extenders on wireless communication performance.