Software-Defined Radio Based Measurement Platform For Wireless Networks

End-to-end latency is critical to many distributed applications and services that are based on computer networks. There has been a dramatic push to adopt wireless networking technologies and protocols (such as WiFi, ZigBee, WirelessHART, Bluetooth, ISA100.11a, etc.) into time-critical applications. Examples of such applications include industrial automation, telecommunications, power utility, and financial services. While performance measurement of wired networks has been extensively studied, measuring and quantifying the performance of wireless networks face new challenges and demand different approaches and techniques. In this paper, we describe our work in progress of designing a measurement platform based on the technologies of software-defined radio (SDR) and IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) for evaluating the performance of wireless networks.