Record WiFi performance and errors over time

Question

I'm having intermittent performance and connection problems occuring in my wireless home network. Sometimes it slows to a crawl on all wirelessly connected devices or loses the connection entirely.

I'd now like to record some objective data on the problem to help me troubleshoot it. Ideally I would like to record signal strength, speed and latency of the connection and any connection errors occuring. Any additional information I didn't think of that would be helpful for troubleshooting this problem is also welcome.

The recorded information should be persistent, so that I can review the time course later.

I have a Windows XP computer on LAN connected to the network, a Windows 7 notebook, an iPad and an Android phone available for troubleshooting.

Answer 1

Here are a few things to try and a clarification question.

First off, what is the access point you are using?(brand and model would be helpful)

As for the monitoring of your network I would take a look at NetStumbler which you should be able to run on the Laptop to pull information such as signal strength as well what clients are associated with you access point. It may also include error rates(not positive on that since I haven't used NetStumbler in a while).

Next, I would check the logs of the access point for any errors and suspicious messages(e.g. Large numbers of deauthentication or reassociation requests)

Lastly, see if your access point supports SNMP. If it does see if the manufacturer publishes a MIB(is a file that defines data sources on the device that can be queried) for the device. If there isn't a published MIB don't worry, as you can still use any SNMP tool to query the device for general information such as packet in/out/error. You can also use a tool such as MRTG to display the SNMP info in graphs.

Hope that gives you some ideas.