wifi stress test chipset
we got project from the company that we need to do performance test to check the limited of the chipset and the GW (memory , cpu ) but we have limited resources (money :\ just for compre some solution cost 350,000 us dollar) so we come with plan how to do with less then 10k us dollar
so we buy pc (usb 3.0) + 30 wifi adapters + 4 hub usb with power supply and go see how much crazy we are.
start to works
for sure windows cannot do this test (cannot handle with 30 wifi adapters) so we take Linux
the issue here we must gui (because we want usnig this pc also for other stuff) and we want control
on the order and limited
we test 2 os for this job
ubuntu 18.04
mint 18.2
on ubuntu was issue on "networkmanager" gui he was stack every time and try load all the 30 wifi adapters in the sometime in mint same story but mint not stack but take many resources and also try associate in the same time all the 30 wifi adapters
he take couple of hours but we solved the problem + control evey adapter
we downgrade 1 level to the driver layer and kill networkmanager now we can associate the wifi only in "wifi header" layer without network layer (very cool!) + debug it because we are on driver layer
next step
we need create clients bind the wifi adapters so evey client will have 1 wifi and he can do traffic (also can be contorl by ssh) for this job we using "virtualbox" with "VBoxManage" that can configure and running vm in the background we install ubuntu server and associate it to every wifi adapter
so now we have 30 wifi adapters + 30 Vm
challenge done !!!
also many thanks for the help to my team number @Anton
note :
- we write script running the test in easy way
- because we have many wifi adapters we choose associate on random ( avoid interference)
- in the end the script tell you how much he try associate and in the end how much success
screenshot
how much wifi adapters try to associate
summary