Some NV2 vs Nstreme vs 802.11 numbers

RouterOS General
1

I had a bit of time to do some testing tonight on an AP I have been testing the 4.16 NV2 package on.

Here are some numbers of aggregate throughput and latency. This was done by pushing speed tests to 4 clients at the same time.

These were all with 5Mhz channel XR2 on the AP side and Alpha a/b/g on the clients.

802.11 4.5M latency in the 400ms-500ms range. Tested several settings rts/cts ADI etc and this was the best I could get.

Nstreme 9.7M with variable latency from 40ms-500ms I tried several different framing modes and settings and this is the best I could get.

NV2 Cell Radius 10km

One thing to note here that no matter what I had the TDMA period size set to once the AP was saturated the latency was almost identical between 35ms-55ms at TDMA settings ranging from 2-10.

TDMA period size 2 3.9M

TDMA period size 4 5.1M

TDMA period size 6 6.8M

TDMA period size 8 7.8M

TDMA period size 10 9.0M

Nstreme edged out NV2 by a small margin in throughput but NV2 killed nstreme on latency once the AP was saturated. If I get time tomorrow night I will test 10 Mhz channels. It shows some promise if the bugs get worked out of the NV2 package and if we can get GPS sync for ROS.

2

Some hints on testing:

  • do not only test under ideal signal conditions. At least one cpe should have bad signal to measure the influence. Put this cpe under load and look how this influences overall performance.
  • test with one of the cpes your oldest gear in production (to make sure one slow board cant slow the whole net)
  • queuing strategy on the aps wireless interface makes a big difference. Even if the
    link is not saturated you get big differences. Use pcq for best results.
3

Here are some numbers from 10Mhz channels.

By the way this is an outdoor tower mounted sector and it is seeing its share of noise. The clients tested have a mixture of CCQ.

Again these numbers are aggregate.

802.11 6-8M with 174-471 latency.

Nstreme 8-14M bounced around quite a bit with variable latency from 30-60ms

NV2 same settings as before

TDMA period size 2 6.4M 18-30ms

TDMA period size 4 10.4M 21-31ms

TDMA period size 6 13.5M 22-36ms

TDMA period size 8 15.6M 30-55ms

TDMA period size 10 15.8M 36-64ms

To a single client with average CCQ NV2 will push 21M with a period size of 10

I doubt if I test 20mhz because I don’t have enough room to test a 20Mhz channel in 2.4Ghz at this location.