Monitoring the MAC layer queue(s) / others

[Nayden Markatchev]

Hello everyone,

I am a student research assistant at the University of Calgary and I am
part of a team whose focus is Wireless Broadband Networks ie. 802.11.
Needless to say, the work of the hostap team, and that of the user
community, can be of tremendous importance for us in the future but we are
also looking forward to not only using your product but also
to contributing to it.

Here is where I should mention that our team's expertise is in layer 3 and
above, which, according to my impression, is not exactly in the area of
the hostap core, but in our analysis we have noticed that in order to get
clear understanding about wireless network and protocol performance we
have to be able to monitor what is going on at the wireless channel. We
are also in an initial phase of collaborating with the EE wireless group,
but since they are a new team, they still don't have their own lab,
therefore it will take them a few months to get up to speed. ;)

The issues I currently stumbled into are the following:

I have an IBM T30 that want to temporarily convert to an access point to
test fairness issues between a number of wireless web clients issuing requests
to a web server that is behind an access point. For the purpose I got a WPC11v3
PCMCIA card that comes with STA 1.4.2. After reading Jason Boxman's
and Jun Sun's Mini-Howto (excellent documents by the way), using the
prism2_srec utility I attempted to upgrade the station firmware to 1.4.9,
but the upgrade failed with the following error message:

ioctl[PRISM2_IOCTL_DOWNLOAD]: Invalid argument
Download failed!

n. b. I have uncommented PRISM2_DOWNLOAD_SUPPORT and
PRISM2_NON_VOLATILE_DOWNLOAD in driver/modules/hostap_config.h , and
recompiled the driver and the utilities. I used the hostap cvs code from
Oct 9.

Having had the upgrade failed, I decided to proceed using the factory
firmware just to give it a try so in a hour I have everything running
smooth and dandy. Naturally, I am wondering what is the issue with 1.4.2
since although we haven't done any experiment yet, from a user point of
view the setup seems to work fine.

As part of the test, we also want to monitor the MAC layer transmit and
receive queues and although all the information I am asking for is already
in the code, since it will take me a while to familiarize myself with it,
I will appreciate a few pointers.

Cheers,
Nayden