octoScope, a Spirent company, has introduced a test suite for the TR-398 Issue 2 Wi-Fi router performance test standard from the Broadband Forum.
Customer care calls and truck rolls associated with Wi-Fi are a big pain point for service providers. They are looking for testing solutions that help them quantify the performance of a Wi-Fi router prior to releasing it on the market. To address this need, Broadband Forum has recently released an update to its TR-398 in-home Wi-Fi router performance standard.
Issue 2 of TR-398 added performance test cases for Wi-Fi 6 and for mesh networks. TR-398 is the only standard to systematically and quantitatively evaluate home Wi-Fi router performance. It does this across seven dimensions: receiver sensitivity, throughput, coverage, multiuser support, anti-interference, stability and mesh networks. Issue 2 added test cases to measure the performance of mesh networks, including roaming outage and throughput via mesh repeaters.
octoScope’s TR-398 test suite implements all 17 test cases required by the latest Broadband Forum standard. All can run on octoScope’s STACK-MAX testbed, while 12 of the 17 test cases run on octoScope’s STACK-MIN, and five on octoScope’s STACK-MESH testbed. STACK-MIN and STACK-MESH are both subsets of STACK-MAX. The implementation features a web UI that enables the test cases in TR-398 to be run individually, in groups, or all at once. A printable HTML report is generated at the end of the execution of the test cases.
Test Result Summary
- Test start time: 2021-03-29 14-38-26
- Test end time: 2021-03-29 14-56-33
- Test execution time:1087.29 seconds
| Test Band Configuration | Attenuation (dB) | Throughput Requirement |
|---|
| Downlink | Uplink |
|---|
| Expected Throughput | Actual Throughput | Expected Throughput | Actual Throughput |
|---|
802.11ax (5 GHz, Nss=2), 80 MHz,
Channel 36 | 0 | 720 | 881.84 | 720 | 909.82 |
| 10 | 680 | 985.06 | 680 | 929.87 |
| 21 | 540 | 977.00 | 540 | 863.45 |
| 24 | 515 | 882.66 | 515 | 808.85 |
| 27 | 465 | 785.63 | 465 | 731.95 |
| 30 | 400 | 786.61 | 400 | 747.88 |
| 33 | 350 | 601.63 | 300 | 500.40 |
| 36 | 300 | 596.94 | 225 | 494.95 |
| 39 | 200 | 496.73 | 175 | 417.64 |
| 42 | 175 | 356.65 | 150 | 405.41 |
| 45 | 150 | 336.79 | 50 | 319.32 |
| 48 | 50 | 220.36 | 25 | 297.87 |
| 51 | 7 | 149.72 | 5 | 170.25 |
| 54 | 2 | 65.70 | 2 | 138.19 |
| Note: For each configuration, no more than 2 testing points fall below the throughput requirement |
“We are excited to announce this implementation of TR-398 Issue 2, because this test solution will be of great benefit to telecom operators and end users when selecting optimal Wi-Fi solutions,” said Fanny Mlinarsky, Founder of octoScope.
Click here to learn more about Issue 2 of the TR-398 Wi-Fi Performance Standard.
