WiFi Performance Benchmark Testing in a Class-room Environment

Comparison of 802.11ac Wave 2 Access points

Alethea recently conducted WiFi Performance Benchmark testing of four 802.11ac Wave 2, dual band access points in a high-density environment. Tests were conducted with both bands (2.4GHz and 5GHz) enabled and with the single band (5GHz only) enabled modes. The tests of each band configuration were run on separate dates. The access points and firmware versions used for different configurations were:

Two types of performance metrics were measured.

• DL TCP throughput

• Video Experience rating (5 – Excellent, 4 – Good, 3 – Satisfactory, 2 – Not Good, 1 – Poor, 0 – Fail)

Measurements were taken with 40 clients, 70 clients and 100 clients for all the tests.

Goals

DL TCP throughput test:

The purpose of Throughput Test is to measure the raw throughput and standard deviation across clients. The performance goal is to achieve aggregate TCP throughput of 250 Mbps in both bands configuration and 200 Mbps in 5GHz only configuration.

Video Experience test:

The purpose of the Video Test is to measure the  HD video performance. Performance is manually (subjectively) measured on a scale of  5 to 0 –  5 being Excellent and 0 being Fail. The expected performance goal is to get the rating of 3 or above at each resolution and load combination.

Results

Summary

1. In Both bands configuration, Ubiquiti is the best in TCP throughput and the only one to meet the video performance goal.  Performance of Ubiquiti is significantly better than others.
2. In 5GHz only configuration, Meraki is the best in TCP throughput tests while Aruba finished last. But in video tests, Aruba, Ubiquiti, and Ruckus could meet the video performance goals while Meraki did not.
3. HD video streaming performance cannot be assessed based on raw throughput figures. It has to be tested separately

Full disclosure: The tests were sponsored by Ubiquiti. However, Ubiquiti was not involved with the definition of test cases, planning, device configuration, execution or analysis of results. All these tasks were independently undertaken by Alethea. Ubiquiti representatives were not present during the test preparation and execution, nor exerted any indirect influence on these activities