VeriWave Solutions for Wireless Enabled Client Devices Used in Healthcare, Retail and Industrial Applications

Wireless enabled client devices promise un-tethered connectivity, and mobility for mission critical applications ranging from patient monitoring, to inventory control and rapid retail transaction processing. Delivering superior QOE (Quality of Experience) is paramount to the success of such devices. VeriWave offers a unique set of tools to improve:

• Device operation
• Ensure smooth interoperability in loaded network conditions
• Uncover difficult to detect bugs in wireless enabled devices that can cause:
  • Degraded QoE
  • Network outages
  • Unreliability of mission critical networks

Key QoE Care-Abouts in Wireless Networks

• Reliable Connection – The ability to establish and maintain connection under various circumstances; including poor coverage areas.
• Best-in-class Performance – Delivery of high throughput for different types of traffic; packet sizes, packet rates, security protocols; as well as the capability to support a variety of applications.
• Predictable QoS – Ensuring low latency and high throughput by efficient application traffic, including voice, video and data in order to preserve superior user experience.
• Seamless Mobility – The capability to roam from one coverage area to another quickly without severing connection and disrupting services.
• Peaceful Co-existence – The ability to not disrupt or impact connectivity and services of other clients on the network

Common Field Issues Experienced by Wireless Enabled Devices

• Patient monitor experiences unreliable connection to nurse’s station; causes unnecessary alarms
• An employee’s Dual-mode phone kicks other clients off the network upon connection,; causes service interruptions and at times network outages
• A clients PC user FTP download session times-out when other wireless users join the network; affects user experience at hotspots
• A WiFi phone at a hospital drops calls while roaming between APs; disrupts conversations between doctors and nurses
• Bar-code scanner traffic used in package sorting warehouse is unreliable in communicating with mail sorting server; causes sorting errors of critical packages and work-flow disruption
• A retail transaction device moves in and out of range of the wireless AP; causes loss of transaction and billing errors

These wireless enabled client devices are tested and certified. So why are they failing? This can be attributed to the methodology used to test these devices. The current methodology does not test the clients under typical network operational client and traffic load conditions.

WaveClient, VeriWave’s Client Testing Solution, provides the necessary tests needed to isolate wireless client issues independent of network issues, while testing the clients in a variety of situations which are representative of their actual environment conditions once deployed.

WaveClient is part of VeriWave’s complete offering of products and services to qualify and certify enterprise-class wireless networks and network devices.

WaveClient utilizes the air-rate traffic generation and analysis capabilities of VeriWave’s WiFi WaveBlade, and the line-rate traffic generation capabilities of VeriWave’s Ethernet WaveBlade. Both blades offer the unique ability to create real-world network conditions in the lab and test the wireless enabled devices in the same conditions they will experience once deployed, all while maintaining complete control of the environment. Through packet-by-packet un-filtered traffic capture, abnormal client behavior can easily be detected, what-if scenarios are able to be created and tests repeated in an automated fashion to determine long-term stability of the device being tested.

A Typical Use Case of WaveClient Entails the Following Steps:

Patient Monitor Hospital Deployment Test

• Choose the Hospital Deployment Profile from WaveClient
• Setup a traffic load on the AP and enable packet capture on all test ports
• Run a WaveClient Hospital test to baseline the AP and VeriWave clients’ performance
• Record the results
• Connect Patient Monitor device to the AP
• Start the WaveClient Hospital test again
• Observe the performance of the monitor and the VeriWave clients
• Record the results