Triathlon – RF/MAC/PHY Analyzer
Triathlon – RF/MAC/PHY Analyzer is a critically important tool for the development of the new Wi-Fi 6 (11ax) equipment enabling engineers to observe hard-to-capture issues on the RF layer.
Prior to Triathlon, the MAC and IP captures were not time-aligned with the RF measurements as disparate test tools were used to view them. It took a long time to manually search the unsynchronized traces from multiple instruments to find the root cause of poor performance.
Triathlon enables engineers to trigger the LitePoint IQxel-MW in real-time, synchronize the Wireshark captures with the RF measurements performed by the LitePoint PHY layer traffic analysis software and then click on problematic packets in the Wireshark captures to view the underlying RF measurements. This new capability saves months of development and helps engineers optimize the performance of the challenging new Wi-Fi 6 OFDMA technology.
Operating OTA in the stable and repeatable environment of the octoBox personal testbed, Triathlon integrates the LitePoint IQxel-MW RF measurement system with octoScope’s Pal-6™ chipset-based instrument. The Pal-6 can trigger the LitePoint to capture events of interest in real-time, enabling detection of root cause at the RF layers.
The OFDMA technology used by Wi-Fi 6 is particularly challenging at the PHY and RF layers. For example, stations in an OFDMA link in order to transmit simultaneously without interfering with one another, must frequency-lock to within 350 Hz and equalize their signal as seen by the access point, all within a few microseconds. Prior to Wi-Fi 6, the RF issues could be tested separately from the higher layers because such time-critical RF requirements were uncommon, but with the fast lock requirements and multiple OFDMA stations potentially interfering with one another as they simultaneously transmit on the air, RF issues are at the root of most throughput problems and require a tool like Triathlon to deliver synchronized captures and ability to trigger RF measurements based on events of interest at the higher layers.
The PCAP captures, real-time analysis and event-based triggering are performed by octoScope’s Pal-6 instrument. With Triathlon, engineers can trigger the RF analyzer to start or stop capturing the events identifiable in real-time by the Pal 6.
A highly integrated refrigerator-sized testbed, the octoBox simplifies wireless device and system level testing by controlling the RF environment and emulating the airlink conditions, including motion, interference and traffic.