Re: Get adhoc signal strength and bandwith from userspace

[bruno randolf <br1@einfach.org>]

On Wednesday 21 May 2008 11:06:42 Henning Rogge wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm looking for an easy way to get average signal strength and bandwith for
> each communication partner in adhoc mode. I know this could be done with
> radiotap headers, but this would require to parse all incoming frames,
> which can consume lot's of cputime on embedded devices.
>
> Is there a userspace interface to get the bandwith and average signal
> strength of the communication partners in the 802.11 layer ?

i don't think that exists yet, but i'm interrested in something like that too, 
and i guess most people involvend in mesh networking protocols and metrics.

however i think "average signal quality" and "thruput" is a bit much to ask 
for (average over which period of time? weighted average? moving average?) - 
how about signal/noise of the last packet, physical rate and bytes in/out 
instead? you can average and calculate bandwidth in userspace.

now a question to the mac80211 maintainers: would that be something to be 
implemented with nl80211? 

bruno