A traffic testbed to help in a site survey procedure for the deployment of a WiFiPhone network

Today, smartphones are being equipped with an important set of different sensors that could be used to detect: sound, motion and location. This feature, in addition to the use of wireless communication networks are offering the possibility to build wireless sensor networks using smartphones as network nodes, in order to collect and transmit data from its surrounding environment. Unfortunately, by the nature of RF, wireless networks are disturbed by many factors such as signal attenuation and radio interferences, which could affect the devices communication and their ability to deliver the collected data. Because of these facts implementing a network of smartphones that use WiFi communication implies that devices should be carefully placed, in a way that they can communicate with each other. To deal with this situation, there is a set of commonly used tools for the site survey process, among them are spectrum analyzers and packet sniffers to measure the RF signal range and to detect and evaluate the potential for interferences. In this work, we implemented an traffic testbed that can help during a site survey process, identifying if the communication between Android smartphones can be effectively reached, even though they have being placed distant from each other.