Diversity for wifibroadcast

This post describes a new feature of wifibroadcast: Software diversity.

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Update 06/02/1025: The new diversity code from 06/01 worked fine on my desktop pc but showed some rare problems on a Raspberry A+. The TX_RESTART was triggered sometimes by out of order packets (with a block distance of 10 blocks!). Due to that I increased the threshold for the TX_RESTART trigger. The Downside is that the empirical tuning of the -d parameter does not work anymore. So I’ll have to write a tool that determines the -d value automatically…

Update 06/01/2015: I’ve added a new parameter to wifibroadcast for diversity. With -d you can define the number of retransmission blocks that will be kept as a window buffer. The parameter defaults to one (which minimizes latency). However, if you use diversity with wifi adapters of different types, they might deliver their data at different times. The -d parameter should be set so that the window buffer spans over the time difference between the two adapters.
The empirical approach of finding the right setting is simple: If -d is too low, you should see often the message “TX RESTART”. Increase the -d parameter until this message disappears and you have found the correct setting.

An active commenter on this blog, malkauns, has started development on software support for diversity. The general idea is: You use more than one WIFI receiver and combine the received data. Due to multipath and other effects the probability that you receive a single packet correctly increases with each added receiver. Together with malkauns I integrated this feature into the default branch of wifibroadcast.

Usage

The usage is extremely simple: Just call wifibroadcast with more WIFI adapters:

./rx wlan0 wlan1

Please note that currently you need two identical adapters. Different types can introduce a delay between the received data streams that currently cannot be processed by wifibroadcast. In this case the systems works but you gain little advantage from diversity.

First measurements

My first experiments showed that the reception quality increases drastically. I tested the feature in a noisy environment with lots of surrounding networks. In every case the packet drop rate was at least one order of magnitude lower when using two adapters. In 90% of the cases it was even better by two orders of magnitude.

Conclusion and outlook

The results are very promising. I think in the future I’ll use diversity on all of my flights. Since the TL-WN722N is very cheap, this feature should be useful to many adopters. There are still some open issues with diversity that need to be solved. The support of different adapter types in parallel is one thing that is planned. Also, there is possibly some potential for smarter FEC in this case. Currently the diversity only works on packet basis. It may be a good idea to dive into their content. We’ll see 🙂