Compliance Evaluation of Wi-Fi™ Devices

The goal of this paper is to develop an experimental hardware testbed for verifying the compliance of the medium access mechanism of commercially available Wi-Fi™ certified units with the IEEE 802.11 standard. The core of this testbed is based on a Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP), which is used to capture and down-convert the Wi-Fi frames to the baseband. The data captured by the USRP is used to extract the key medium access parameters of the commercial Unit Under Test (UUT). Our measurement methodology is based on the Harmonized European standard ETSI EN 301 893 to identify UUTs with non-compliant access mechanisms that tend to monopolize the wireless medium, and UUTs for which compliance is an option that deviates from default settings.