My old friend and colleague David Molta invited me to speak in a couple of his classes at Syracuse University. Dave, whom I first met when he was spending his time at Network Computing, is one of truly great professionals in the networking (wireless and otherwise) space, and now devotes his days (and many evenings) to inspiring the next generation of experts as an Associate Professor of Practice in the School of Information Studies. I love working with students; the world is nothing but possibilities to them, and over the years I've enjoyed giving lectures at Brown, Harvard Business School, MIT, RPI, WPI, the University of Rhode Island, and now Syracuse.
This time the topic was one truly near and dear to my heart: WLAN testing, performance evaluation, and benchmarking. I discussed many of the approaches I've taken over the years, as well as a few cautionary notes. And I suggested that the tool I originally proposed in this blog back in April of 2012, which would include spectral monitoring, multi-client simulation, packet (Wi-Fi Frame) capture, IP traffic generation, and the correlation analysis of all of these would be an excellent vehicle for making the testing, performance evaluation, and even competitive benchmarking of WLANs practical, repeatable, and reliable. And I hope that at least one member of the audience will be interested enough so as to build something like this - I still think such would make a terrific undergraduate or masters thesis project.
You can find Dave's write-up of my visit here, and there's a link to the .pdf of the slides included as well.