Design and Implementation of Sensing System for Quality Analysis of 802.11 Wireless Links

To facilitate introduction of IoT devices to the environments such as factories and hospitals, it is desirable that the network administrators can accurately monitor the conditions of wireless networks. In the existing schemes or products, physical layer information and MAC layer information are often acquired and analysed individually. In this paper, we propose a sensing system that allows synchronized time series analysis between physical and MAC layers for detailed quality assessment of wireless links. By synchronizing the data from physical and MAC layers, we show that it is possible to identify the cause of frame losses, which occurred due to a hidden terminal problem. We implemented a prototype sensor node using an FPGA and conducted an experiment to acquire the data from both layers. From the experiment, we confirmed that the prototype sensor node has enough performance on time synchronization and resolution between cross layered data.