JamLab-NG: Benchmarking Low-Power Wireless Protocols under Controllable and Repeatable Wi-Fi Interference

Abstract

Evaluating the performance of low-power wireless protocols in noisy environments in a repeatable and fullyautomated way is still an open problem in our community. On the one hand, there is a lack of tools enabling the controllable and repeatable generation of interference using Wi-Fi devices. On the other hand, existing testbeds do not offer the automated generation of Wi-Fi interference on a large-scale. In this work, we present JamLab-NG, an open-source framework allowing the generation of controllable Wi-Fi interference using off-the-shelf devices such as the Raspberry Pi 3. JamLab-NG enables the fine-grained control of individual link-layer transmissions, avoiding the uncontrollable delays introduced by the network stack, the operating system, and the clear channel assessment procedure. Furthermore, JamLab-NG allows to generate repeatable Wi-Fi interference patterns by controlling radio settings such as the transmission speed and the packet length, which would otherwise be automatically adapted by the radio firmware at run-time. We use JamLab-NG to augment a testbed and embed the generation of Wi-Fi interference into its automated execution of experiments. Among others, we allow remote configuration of the interference generated by individual Wi-Fi devices, and show that they can operate in a synchronized fashion. Finally, we use the augmented testbed to benchmark the performance of state-of-the-art IoT protocols under Wi-Fi interference in a repeatable and fully-automated way.