Multi-radio based active and passive wireless network measurements

This paper presents an assessment of the performance of off-the-shelf multi-radio based nodes when carrying out wireless network measurements. The study reveals how despite the fact that inter-device interference can degrade the performance of multi-radio nodes, this does not prevent obtaining quality measurements as long as the limitations of the architecture are taken into account. The study shows that multi-radio devices can work without experiencing any performance degradation up to a certain workload limit. This limit exists for both active and passive measurements and depends on issues such as (1) the hardware devices being used, (2) the frequency channel separation between them, (3) the length of the packets sent/received, (4) the attenuation level between their antennas, and (5) the impedance adaptation of the RF components used. This paper also shows that it is possible to combine active and passive measurements in a single multi-radio node without experiencing performance degradation in any of them.