Ruckus Wireless Releases Performance Tool to Open Source

Ruckus Wireless has released its "Zap" wireless performance testing program to the Open Source Community.


Originally developed by Ruckus engineers to characterize wireless behavior of real-time IP-based video streaming applications, Zap is a wireless performance measurement utility designed to determine wireless network signal performance accurately over time, space and frequency. The tool provides a statistical analysis that anticipates the performance of a wireless network by predicting the percent of time and the locations at which performance will be above or below a certain limit.


By design, Zap lets network planners test sustained throughput of an existing wireless network and determine the true, sustained and worst-case performance that it is capable of delivering 99.5 percent of the time. Using Zap, organizers can also predict the real-life performance of a system before deployment.


"With wireless you need to understand the statistical throughput distribution in order to really characterize performance. Zap gives you that. Other performance testing tools only tell you average throughput, which is often irrelevant to demanding applications," said Bill Kish, chief technology officer and co-founder of Ruckus Wireless. "As good as Zap is, by releasing the code as open source, we believe the software community can make it even better, perhaps even incorporate it into new commercial testing tools. Wi-Fi is becoming a critical network access infrastructure and anything that shines a brighter light onto Wi-Fi performance is a good thing for the industry."


Zap is currently integrated into Ruckus ZoneFlex Smart wireless LAN products as the underlying engine used by SpeedFlex, a Wi-Fi performance diagnostic tool that lets customers quickly determine the uplink and downlink performance and packet loss of any given wireless connection.
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