I have been sitting here looking at wifi air packet captures off and on for years now, trying to come up with a representation, over time, of what the actual airtime usage (and one day, fairness) would look like. Believe me, looking at the captures is no fun, and (for example) wireshark tends to misinterpret unreceived retries at different rates inside a txop as tcp retries (which, while educational, makes it hard to see actual retries)...
Finally today, I found a conceptual model that "fits" - and it's kind of my hope that something already out there does this from packet captures. (?) Certainly there are lots of great pie chart tools out there... Basically you start with a pie chart representing a fixed amount of time - say, 128ms. Then for each device transmitting you assign a slice of the pie for the amount of airtime used. Then, you can show the amount of data transmitted in that piece of the pie by increasing the volume plotted for that slice of the pie. And you sweep around continually (like a radar scanning or a timepiece's pointer) to show progress over time, and you show multicast and other traffic as eating the whole pie for however long it lasts. conceptually it looks a bit like this: http://blog.cerowrt.org/images/fairness.png (I borrowed this graph from http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/11/easily-create-stunning-animated-charts-with-chart-js/ ) Another way to do it would be to have the pie represent all the stations on the network, and to have the "sweep hand" jump between them... -- Dave Täht Let's go make home routers and wifi faster! With better software! http://blog.cerowrt.org _______________________________________________ Bloat mailing list [email protected] https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/bloat
