eWEEK - December 6, 2010

bidirectional MOS (Mean Opinion Scores) values before and after roaming, allowing an administrator to see the effects the roaming behavior has had on voice quality.

To aid in generating that score, the roaming analysis tool enumerates detected delays, breaking that value down further to identify delays caused by AP selection, 802.11 association, authentication and key exchange.

Analyzer Pro’s Air Wise technology also attempts to identify the conditions that potentially caused the roaming to occur.

I’d also avoid connecting or dis-
connecting adapters from the PC
while Analyzer Pro is running,
since I experienced a sudden-onset
Blue Screen of Death when I tried
to do that.
“When we first developed the
multiadapter feature, it was primar-
ily to target two feedback scenarios:
WLAN client roaming analysis and
the ability to focus on three chan-
nels without losing frames,” said
Dilip Advani, AirMagnet’s director
of product management.
“For both of these requirements,
we needed to be fixed on the chan-
nels, and hence the implementa-
tion,” Advani said. “Technically
we are not limited to allowing two
[adapters] fixed on a channel, while
one is scanning, and we’ll revisit
that in the future.”
Analyzer Pro 9.0 comes with
a new dashboard to highlight
network conditions in need of
immediate attention, delivering
second-by-second updates show-
ing top networks by usage, top
talkers, channel utilization and a
global count of WiFi security types
in use. Users can customize the
dashboard with additional charts
highlighting the access points that
are experiencing the most security
or performance issues, as well as
a few other charts. However, the
dashboard contains a maximum
of six charts at a time.
Previous versions of Analyzer
Pro would instead dump the user
in to view all the devices detected—
a view that can now be found on
the new Devices tab. Version 9.0
also makes it more straightfor-
ward to filter detected devices as
access points, stations or ad hoc
connections.
At this time, Analyzer Pro 9.0
does nothing special to highlight
devices connected via WiFi Direct,
although AirMagnet officials say
they are looking at the new speci-
fication in their labs.

Version 9.0 also improved the connection tests that are available to wireless administrators, adding new FTP or HTTP performance tests, plus the Ping and Trace tools previously available. Version 9.0 allowed me to create profiles for each of the connections tests— now dubbed One Touch Connection tests—making it easier for me to spot-check performance against certain online services without having to re-create the test each time. ´

A disappointing detection

I was disappointed to find, however, that Analyzer Pro currently does not allow customers to affix detections to specific channels with a subset of the adapters while scanning across channels with those remaining. When starting Analyzer Pro, I found I needed to select which adapters I would use for the detection session.

If I selected multiple adapters, I needed to set each adapter to one specific channel. However, if I selected only a single adapter, I could either specify a single channel or conduct a sweep across all supported spectra.

To switch between modes, I had to close and restart Analyzer Pro. Therefore, if I wanted to sweep the local environment to find the channels on which the local access points are transmitting and then conduct a targeted analysis of certain channels, I would have to restart the application between these actions. Nor could I listen in on a roam using two sensors while sweeping with the third.