Zap Provides Open Source Wireless Testing

Jan 28, 2010, 13:04 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Charlie Schluting)

""Zap" is a wireless performance tool, previously used for internal development and testing by Ruckus Wireless. Ruckus has released the Zap source code under a modified BSD license to provide the tool to the world, and hopefully spur development of this and other related analysis tools. Zap measures performance, statistically, to provide insight into the true nature of how a network can perform.

"Before Zap, a wireless network administrator might have done some manual calculation to determine a best-guess baseline of how a network would perform. Check to make sure there aren't too many overlapping channels that may cause interference, carefully plan thelayout, and hope. When testing time comes, we might run a large file copy with rsync or even use TTCP, which will tell us, on average, how fast the data transferred. This is fine for bulk transfers, and it may highlight an obvious problem in the network, but network-intensive applications today require more certainty."

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