Ruckus Wireless released its ‘Zap’ wireless performance testing program to the Open Source Community promising to provide a better understanding of actual wireless network performance.

The program can measure performance based on parameter such as time, space and frequency.

“With wireless you need to understand the statistical throughput distribution in order to really characterize performance. Zap gives you that. Other performance testing tools only tell you average throughput, which is often irrelevant to demanding applications,” said Bill Kish, chief technology officer and co-founder of Ruckus Wireless. “As good as Zap is, by releasing the code as open source, we believe the software community can make it even better, perhaps even incorporate it into new commercial testing tools. Wi-Fi is becoming a critical network access infrastructure and anything that shines a brighter light onto Wi-Fi performance is a good thing for the industry.”

Zap aims to address the concern surrounding wireless testing pertaining to inability to control environmental changes which cause fluctuations in performance. According to Ruckus since actual wireless performance is inherently statistical in nature, accurate performance testing must account for random components such as regulatory power limits, local digital noise and RF component variation. Zap precisely addresses this concern by providing a statistical analysis that anticipates the performance of a wireless network by predicting the percent of time and the locations at which performance will be above or below a certain limit. 

It does so by sending controlled bursts of packets and measuring both packet loss and inter-arrival times. The primary results reported are number of packets lost, total packets received and detailed throughput statistics.

By measuring the maximum throughput of batches of packets, Zap is able to determine the minimum throughput that can be expected at a given percentile. The program suits testing of video applications as by determining the maximum throughput a given IP wireless network can deliver, the network designers can accordingly design a picture-perfect viewing system.