An Extendable And Modular Application Framework For WLAN Feature Validation

Abstract

IEEE 802.11 is a set of (MAC Layer) Media Access Control (MAC) and (PHY Later) Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications for implementation of (WLAN) wireless local area network communication in the 2.4, 3.6, 5, and 60 GHz frequency bands. IEEE 802.11 Standard is similar to Ethernet on a superficial level. Many additional fea- tures were added to clear out the differences between wireless media used by 802.11 and wired networks. The implementation of these features for testing and devel- opment is redundant and long process requiring much effort. The reason behind developing an extensible and modular framework for the validation of these features was to reduce the human intervention and reduce the time required to bring up the WLAN drivers in specific modes. In this report, IEEE 802.11 standard and its components are described in brief. The ow of the working of the tool is described in this report. Entire tool is implemented and developed in Python. This tool is mainly used for the validation of different WLAN features enabled. The tool allows easy exten- sion to the module to be used for various different test cases which can be easily modified by the developer. It is used to bringup various kinds of test scenarios to be validated. Throughput tests are included by using the Iperf tool and logs of the throughput results are also taken. Configuration and bringing up of all com- ponents used at the test bed can be done by using this tool. Logging is included which extracts the required terminal and dmesg logs along with the Iperf throughput logs. By studying these logs the errors can be found out about where the firmware crashed. Error checks are include such as detecting whether device is active, each command executed on the terminal returns success, interface creation of each mode of the DUT are included. The tool exits when a crash occurs. Proper logs and dumps are taken and are pushed to proper location for further use.