Measure Wi-Fi Bandwidth Using Two Intel® Edison Boards

Documentation

Maintenance & Performance

000006215

09/14/2017

You can use this guide to test the bandwidth between two Intel® Edison Boards. The bandwidth performance can vary depending on the environment. Iperf* was used to measure the TCP and UDP bandwidth.

For this test, the first Intel Edison Board (Server) is configured as an access point. The second Intel Edison Board (Client) is connected to the Intel Edison Server via Wi-Fi. Follow these steps:

  1. Download and copy Iperf* to the home directory of both Intel® Edison Compute Modules.
  2. Use the tar command to extract the iperf package to the home directorytar -xvf iperf_2.0.2-4_i386.tar.gz
  3. Use the configure_edison command to set up the Server as an access point.configure_edison --enableOneTimeSetup
  4. Use the configure_edison command to connect the Client to the Server via Wi-Ficonfigure_edison -wifi

Follow these steps to test TCP bandwidth between two Intel® Edison boards.

  1. Use the cd command to navigate to the extracted directorycd iperf_2.0.2-4_i386
  2. Use the ifconfig command to retrieve the IP Address of the Serverifconfig
  3. Use iperf to start the TCP Server./iperf -s
  4. Use iperf to start the TCP Client with the Server's IP Address as a parameter./iperf -c 192.168.42.1

The output should look similar to what appears below:

output example

Follow these steps to test UDP bandwidth between two Intel Edison Boards.

  1. Use the cd command to navigate to the extracted directorycd iperf_2.0.2-4_i386
  2. Use the ifconfig command to retrieve the IP Address of the Serverifconfig
  3. Use iperf to start the UDP Server./iperf -s -u -i 1
  4. Use iperf to start the UDP Client with the Servers IP Address as a parameter ./iperf -c 192.168.42.1 -u -b -10m

The output should look similar to what appears below:

output example

Using these tests we can see the TCP had a bandwidth of 27.5 Mbits/sec and UDP had a bandwidth of 27.8 Mbits/sec. The test can also be set up between a PC and an Intel Edison board on the same network.