More Than Throughput: Next Generation Wi-Fi Testing with Ixia’s WaveDevice

It’s been quite some time since I first started writing for AnandTech, and without question there’s been a lot of changes that have happened to our testing methodologies in the past few years. One of the main issues that I’ve always been thinking about while working through reviews is how we could improve our testing methodology in a meaningful way outside of simply updating benchmarks to stay current. Internally we’ve been investigating these issues for quite some time now, and these changes have included the addition of SoC power efficiency comparisons and display power efficiency measurements. There are a lot of other changes here and there that I still want to make, but one of the major unexplored areas has been wireless radio performance.

Wireless performance testing is probably one of the hardest things that we could test, and for a time I had almost given up hope on deploying such testing within AnandTech. However life has a way of playing out differently than I expect, and in the past few months we’ve been working with Ixia to make Wi-Fi testing a reality. Ixia, for those of our readers who aren't familiar with the company, is a traditional player in the networking test space. They are perhaps best known for their Ethernet test products, and more recently have been expanding into wireless and security testing with the acquisition of companies like VeriWave and BreakingPoint Systems.

We have done Wi-Fi testing before, but in the past we were mainly focused upon a relatively simple and arguably not particularly interesting test case: maximum throughput in ideal conditions. It was obvious that Wi-Fi in many devices is still not perfect, as subjective differences in reception and reliability can feel obvious. However, without any data or methods of replication it was hard to really prove that what we felt about wireless performance was really the case. To see how we've changed this, read on for the full article.