AirMagnet WiFi Analyzer Pro 9 For Roaming: Review

Bidirectional MOS

For voice over WiFi traffic, Analyzer Pro also generates bidirectional MOS (Mean Opinion Scores) values before and after roaming, allowing an administrator to see the effects the roaming behaviour has had on voice quality.

To aid in generating that score, the roaming analysis tool enumerates detected delays, breaking that value down further to identify delays caused by AP selection, 802.11 association, authentication and key exchange.

Analyzer Pro’s AirWise technology also attempts to identify the conditions that potentially caused the roaming to occur.

I was disappointed to find, however, that Analyzer Pro currently does not allow customers to affix detections to specific channels with a subset of the adapters while scanning across channels with those remaining.

Complicated Detection Setting

When starting Analyzer Pro, I found I needed to select which adapters I would use for the detection session. If I selected multiple adapters, I needed to set each adapter to a one specific channel, but if I selected only a single adapter, I could specify a single channel or I could conduct a sweep across all supported spectra.

To switch between modes, I needed to close and restart Analyzer Pro. This means that if I wanted to sweep the local environment to find the channels on which the local access points are transmitting and then conduct a targeted analysis of certain channels, I needed to restart the application between these actions. Nor could I listen in on a roam using two sensors while sweeping with the third.

I’d also avoid connecting or disconnecting adapters from the PC while Analyzer Pro is running, since I experienced a sudden-onset Blue Screen of Death when I tried that.

“When we first developed the multi-adapter feature, it was primarily to target two primary feedback scenarios: WLAN client roaming analysis and the ability to focus on three channels without losing frames,” said Dilip Advani, AirMagnet’s director of product management. “For both of these requirements, we needed to be fixed on the channels, and hence the implementation.”

Advani continued, “Technically we are not limited to allowing two (adapters) fixed on a channel, while one is scanning, and [we] will revisit that in the future.”

New Dashboard for Immediate Attention

Analyzer Pro 9.0 comes with a new dashboard to highlight network conditions in need of immediate attention, delivering second-by-second updates showing top networks by usage, top talkers, channel utilisation and a global count of WiFi security types in use.

Users can customise the dashboard with additional charts highlighting the access points experiencing the most security or performance, as well as a few other charts. However, the dashboard contains a maximum of six charts at one time.

Previous versions of Analyzer Pro would instead dump the user into view of all devices detected—a view that can now be found on the new Devices tab. Version 9.0 also makes it more straightforward to filter detected devices as access points, stations or ad hoc connections.

At this time, Analyzer Pro 9 does nothing special to highlight devices connected via WiFi Direct, although AirMagnet officials say they are looking at the new specification in their labs.

Version 9 also improved the connection tests available to wireless administrators, adding new FTP or HTTP performance tests plus the Ping and Trace tools previously available.

Version 9 allowed me to create profiles for each of the connections tests—now dubbed One Touch Connection tests—making it easier to spot-check performance against certain online services without having to recreate the test each time.