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Feb 25, 2009

Mechanism to measure WiFi signals

For my Final Year Project progress, I need to measure the signals produced from the Wi-Fi access points in Kulliyyah of ICT. 

In Wi-Fi access points, there is three (3) signals that can be measure and take into account for my FYP research, which are (a) Signal Strength, (b) Signal Quality, and (c) Signal Noise. The things that matter right now is the mechanism to measure those signals and save it as the experiment data. 

After several moment of research, I found out that Linux has an application that can scan the signal strength, quality and noise from the access points, which called iwlist.

This application (iwlist) scans and retrieve the information of the access points like the MAC Address, Signal Strength, Signal Quality, Signal Noise and etc. What actually matters to my project are the Signal Strength, Signal Quality, Signal Noise of the access points.

From here, I then manipulated the source code of built-in iwlist in Linux and make it smaller and standalone. Next, I develop another script that integrate with iwlist to manipulate the output and save the information in a database-like form for later retrieval and calculation.

Might need several days to finish developing those measurement mechanism. hmmm.