Prepping for Wireless Field Day 6

Wireless Field Day 6 is quickly approaching! The sponsors of this week's are a varied bunch. Some new, some returning for another WFD event. It's guaranteed to be information packed and technologically mind melting!

Wednesday, Jan 29	10:00-12:00	AirTight Networks Presents at Wireless Field Day 6
Wednesday, Jan 29	14:00-16:00	Aruba Networks Presents at Wireless Field Day 6
Wednesday, Jan 29	16:30-17:30	Disaster Tech Lab Presents at Wireless Field Day 6
Thursday, Jan 30	8:30-9:30	Plan Ceibal Presents at Wireless Field Day 6
Thursday, Jan 30	10:00-12:00	Cloudpath Networks Presents at Wireless Field Day 6
Thursday, Jan 30	13:00-15:00	Xirrus Presents at Wireless Field Day 6
Thursday, Jan 30	16:00-18:00	Extreme Networks Presents at Wireless Field Day 6

I'll be reunited with returning delegates Blake Krone, George Stefanick, Keith Parsons, Lee Badman, Jake Snyder, Sam Clements and Scott Stapleton and exposing the new delegates to the typical WFD hazing (joking!!). The new delegates are: Germán Capdehourat, Evert Bopp and Richard McIntosh.

As it stands today, I'm most curious about the Disaster Tech Labs and Plan Ceibal presentations, but that's because each of these organizations provides an invaluable resource to disaster survivors/responders (Disaster Tech) and helps the future of Uruguay through the country's youth (Plan Ceibal). 

I did my homework on Plan Ceibal (the one laptop per child project started in Uruguay in 2007) and found a heartwarming story of technology helping to enrich the lives of all Uruguay's state run school children.

I've known Evert (Disaster Tech Labs) through twitter for some time, and I know he's been involved in bringing wireless communications networks to a great many places where natural disasters have occurred.

Aside from that, I'm looking forward to hearing what's new at AirTight, Aruba and Xirrus as well as learning more about Cloudpath and Extreme Networks.

I'll be blogging, photographing and tweeting the event, so tune in to www.techfieldday.com for the live video feeds and watch the #WFD6 hashtag on twitter for the full conversation.

Customer Loyalty, Location Tracking, Big Data and iBeacons

A lot of technology has recently entered the world of retail analytics. Some of it leverages Wi-Fi, some Bluetooth, some audio, but all of it is competing for your customer loyalty (Big Data). The crux of it all is an attempt by the retailer to engage with you, the customer by giving you coupons/discounts in trade for your demographic data or because you completed a task.

Gigwalk connects people/companies who need workers to fulfill temporary workload. Users of Gigwalk can agree to fulfill a requested task/service and receive payment via PayPal. You can think of it as a way for an employer to hire a temp worker without ever performing an interview. Gigwalk is an interesting way to connect employers with employees to complete piecemeal work. It reminds me a little of TaskRabbit but less errand/chore based and more task completion.

Checkpoints awards you points for completing surveys, watching videos, shopping online etc. Checkpoint is aligned with manufacturers instead of retailers. inMarket operates the largest mobile shopper platform and the underlying technology used is the iBeacon platform. 

iBeacons leverage Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to create a location-aware, context-aware wireless network within a retail establishment. The proximity information can be used to send targeted marketing to nearby smart phones to encourage purchases or to award users of the app with points for scanning product barcodes into the app.

Shopkick awards you points ("kicks") for visiting stores, scanning products or making purchases from retailers in the Shopkick network (Sports Authority, Macy's). The "kicks" can be accrued and turned into gift cards, free coffee awards or other prizes. The odd thing I read about Shopkick is that the app asks for permission to use the microphone on your smartphone. This is because the app listens for a specific frequency/sound pattern being transmitted from the Shopkick beacon installed in the store. The app also has the potential to record the audio during a TV broadcast if that is part of an opportunity to earn kicks. This is outlined the Shopkick privacy policy, but I doubt many Shopkick users will actually read this or the app EULA.

"record, determine or use information about or from another content delivery platform (for example, to unlock potential rewards or offers based on your watching of a specific a commercial or show that is broadcast on your television or on the web, the shopkick application may ask you to open the app while you are watching TV, and then we may record or analyze the audio signal from the television set via the shopkick app and your cell phone’s microphone, to determine the commercial, and/or program, including the date and/or time), and (v) record information derived from such above information and other sources such as entries and offers viewed on our website or on our social media presence, or information provided by Affiliated Partners (collectively, “Non-Personally Identifiable Information”)."

Stepsaway is another shopping app that detects customers' smart phones when they are near stores in shopping centers or other public spaces. Stepsaway allows retailers to use a cloud managed platform to push notifications to customers within range of their stores.

It is abundantly clear that the customer is actually the product. Brick and mortar stores are competing with one another for the attention (and wallet) of the consumer. Retailers are willing to offer exclusive discounts to customers to win/retain customer loyalty. What you're trading for those discounts is more than just the space the app takes up on your phone. You're often asked to trade your phone contacts, access to your photos, microphone and location in trade for access to the perceived benefits of the rewards network (via the app).

I'm not the target audience for customer loyalty/shopping apps, but the things I've been reading started me thinking about privacy issues, potential legal issues and how to avoid inadvertently contributing to the demographic database pool.

The fact that the iBeacon technology is Bluetooth with a different name leads me to wonder about how much interference iBeacons add to the 2.4GHz spectrum. How does a wireless infrastructure differentiate between an iBeacon and a Bluetooth source of interference?

Wireless technology is evolving quickly in many disparate ways. It's unclear how iBeacons will be used outside of the retail vertical, or when an active/passive RFID implementation would be preferential over Bluetooth. It's an exciting time in the world of wireless! Some of it makes me a little leery, but I'm hopeful for the possibilities of a more connected world.

Three Wireless USB Adapters in Every Hub, and Omnipeek On Every Laptop #WFD5

Tim McCreery President and CEO of WildPackets presented the company history to the Wireless Field Day 5 delegates. Wildpackets was founded in 1990, and now their customer base spans 60+ countries and over 7,000 customers.

Jay Botelho Director of Product Management spoke next, and gave us the WildPackets technical history.

• First to support data capture and analysis of 802.11ac traffic
• The most comprehensive voice over wifi analysis
• Only application to support remote data capture from commercial enterprise access points
• Best application for distributed networks with remote 24x7 real-time analysis

Since the last time WildPackets presented at WFD4, they've since brought to market full 802.11ac support and data captures from locally-attached or remote access points.



The demonstration of the 802.11ac capture was interesting in that copies of OmniPeek and 802.11ac adapters were gifted to the delegates in order for them to generate 802.11ac traffic in the presentation room. OmniPeek only has drivers for the Ralink chipset wireless adapters at this time, but they should have a two stream adapter supported by the end of this year.

Per Jay Botelho, trusting RSSI reporting from access points is iffy since vendors apply RSSI values differently. WildPackets does some analysis work on the capture that is RSSI, and they have to do some work to convert that to dBi or a percentage value.

OmniPeek has new columns added to it to simplify analysis of an 802.11ac capture:

• MCS value
• Spatial streams
• Bandwidth used
• Data rate

Using multiple adapters to capture data is key in analyzing client roaming in any wireless network. When Jay listed the channels his test network was configured for (2, 6 and 10) I was concerned, since these are not non-overlapping channels. I do not know if this was just for testing purposes that these channels were used, but it isn't an optimal configuration.

• Top pane = flows categorized by application
• bottom pane = problems detected

WildPackets is currently running a special discount on their Mobile WLAN Analyzer bundle. The bundle includes OmniPeek Professional and 3 OmniWiFi USB WLAN (802.11a/b/g/n) adapters. The $900 discount is only good through 10/31/2013.

MU-MIMO They're not calling you names, they're speeding up your Wi-Fi! #Aerohive #WFD5

The thing I always vividly remember from an Aerohive session at Wireless Field Day, is the presentation by Matthew Gast. I love how he intertwines fun facts and figures into a slide deck AND uses matrix math to explain things that are still (somewhat) theoretical in nature.

At the WFD5 event, Matthew Gast presented on MU-MIMO in 802.11ac. I tried to take notes, but the  information flow was more than my brain buffer can process in real-time.


802.11ac Wave-2 and its enablers

• explicit beamforming in 802.11ac
• matrix math
• implementation
• null steering
• acknowledgement and queueing

4 features of 802.11ac

• wider channels (80 & 160MHz)
• more spatial streams (up to 8 in a single user tx, 4 in a multi-user tx)
• 256-QAM
• downlink MU-MIMO

null data packets

• not even a L2 construct
• it's a phy layer data plane to describe the way the energy will be steered

Multiple devices connected at the 64 QAM rates will be able to send/receive more data than a single 256 QAM device will tx/rx.


Several matrices are used in matrix math:

• H is the channel matrix that describes the path between transmitter and receiver
• Q is the steering matrix that alters the distribution of energy along a path
• V is the feedback matrix, sent as part of the measurement process to derive Q

The feedback loop based on speeds now is "Did you get an ACK or not?", it's not a matrix describing the connectivity. You can mix data rates inside a feedback matrix data result.

The block ack protocol is used when transmitting to multiple devices at the same time. This is a layer on top of sending beamformed frames. Data rates within a beamformed frame can be mixed. Block ACKs get used as a distributed acknowledgment system along with the RTS-CTS mechanism.

Multi-user MIMO is trading total overall throughput for individual peak throughput, and only works downstream.

The GCMP encryption requires AES but has fewer trips through the AES block and is still only optional in 802.11ac. 

I know all of that is quite a mouthful of acronyms! If you haven't watched the Aerohive presentation series, you'd be doing yourself a favor if you did.



Aerohive ID Manager Demonstration at WFD5 from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.


Aerohive Client Management Demonstration from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.


Aerohive Application Visibility and Control Demonstration from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.


Aerohive Application Visibility and Control Presentation at WFD5 from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.

Surveying for Gigabit WiFi is no Fluke #WFD5

Fluke announced their new 802.11ac site survey capabilities with the latest version of AirMagnet Survey PRO at Wireless Field Day 5.

According to AirMagnet, the client cards they used to do the testing (Edimax & Trendnet) showed vast differences between the adapters, but there was no repeatable reason for why the testing was so different. 


Introduction to Fluke Networks Wi-Fi with Chia-Chee Kuan at WFD5 from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.

Fluke will be offering a free upgrade to the new 802.11ac software for Gold support customers, and AirMagnet Planner will have 802.11ac capabilities - but it will come after Survey PRO has been released to support 802.11ac. Beta testing of the Survey PRO is currently under way.

At the time of #WFD5 AirMagnet couldn't work in promiscuous mode with any 802.11ac adapters. There was no schedule that could be discussed in public, but it is a work in progress.

The RF coverage heat map is designed to show primary and secondary overlap of channel allocation. The heat map will show in yellow where the secondary channels overlap and this is where wireless speeds will fall back to slower data rates instead of the higher 802.11ac rates.

Fluke Networks Introduces Survey Pro with 802.11ac at Wireless Field Day 5 from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.

Their AirMapper tool hasn't been updated for use on any 801.11ac phones/devices yet. Some 802.11ac phones are already available in AsiaPac and the UK, but none are for sale stateside yet. These new devices will be migrated into Airmapper soon.

The thing I found most interesting about their WFD5 presentation was the off the record presentation about their not-yet-released (but it is now) product called AirMagnet Spectrum ES. This application takes the user interface you know from the AirMagnet Spectrum XT application and brings it into the world of cellular Wi-Fi. 

I put together a playlist of all the demo videos they've uploaded to YouTube. It's well worth checking out. From what I can find, it seems the retail price for ES will be around $6k which is a veritable bargain compared to the average cellular testing tool which can cost $14K!

Wait, What? #WFD5 is NEXT WEEK!

Where did all the time go?

Wait, I know exactly where all the time went! I've been cleaning, packing, cleaning some more and moving into a house where I'll have a dedicated room for a real lab!

Next week is going to be packed full of visits to interesting wireless companies.
Many of this events sponsors are brand new to #WFD and that's extra exciting! I'll be taking lots of notes as the presentations are unfolding and posting my takeaways once WFD has concluded and all the videos are posted on Vimeo/YouTube

I've read everyone's pre-event blog posts as they were published, here's the complete pre-list if you've not read them yet:

• Jake - The Next Adventure: Wireless Field Day 5
• Lee - The ‘New’ Enterprise WLAN Vendor, What I Hope To Get From Wireless Field Day 5
• Dale - Virtual High Five for Wireless Field Day 5!
• Keith - Wireless Tech Field Day #5 – Plan For It!
• And Matthew Norwood, who won't be there but still wrote Another Controller-less Wi-Fi Solution

The delegates this time around are a gathering of new and familiar faces. I'm happy to be chosen as a delegate again! Wireless Field Day is always a whirlwind of places to be, tech to talk and brains to pick.

Blake Krone         @BlakeKrone
Chris Lyttle           @WiFiKiwi
Dale M. Rapp       @DaleRapp
Daniel Cybulskie @SimplyWiFi
George Stefanick @WirelesssGuru
Jake Snyder          @JSnyder81
Keith R. Parsons  @KeithRParsons
Lee Badman         @WiredNot
Ryan Adzima        @RAdzima
Sam Clements      @Samuel_Clements

The list of presenters is also a varied bunch!

Wednesday, Aug 7	08:00-10:00	Fluke Networks Presents at Wireless Field Day 5
Wednesday, Aug 7	11:00-13:00	Aerohive Networks Presents at Wireless Field Day 5
Wednesday, Aug 7	14:30-16:30	WildPackets Presents at Wireless Field Day 5
Thursday, Aug 8	08:00-10:00	AirTight Networks Presents at Wireless Field Day 5
Thursday, Aug 8	10:30-12:30	MetaGeek Presents at Wireless Field Day 5
Thursday, Aug 8	14:30-16:30	Motorola Solutions Presents at Wireless Field Day 5
Friday, Aug 9	08:00-10:00	7signal Presents at Wireless Field Day 5
Friday, Aug 9	10:30-12:30	Xirrus Presents at Wireless Field Day 5
Friday, Aug 9	14:00-16:00	Meru Networks Presents at Wireless Field Day 5

The Natalia Project: Civil Rights Defenders Using GSM SMS and CPRS to Send Distress Alerts

I read an interesting article in the May/June 2013 Wireless Design & Development magazine. The article was about the Natalia Project, which is named after a human rights worker Natalia Estemirova who was assassinated in 2009 as she was investigating the alleged kidnappings, torture and extrajudicial killings by Russian government troops or paramilitaries in Chechnya.

The Natalia Project is wireless alerting system (much like active RFID tags). The bracelets are able to send distress signals when activated by the wearer, or when the bracelet shows signs of tampering. The tampering sensor activates automatically if the bracelet is removed by force. If the wearer activates the alerting mechanism manually, the bracelet engages a patented locking mechanism to lock the bracelet onto the wearer's arm.

The technology used is a combination of Global System for Communications (GSM) and a Global Positioning System (GPS) chip. The GSM chip is used for sending alarms and location coordinates while Short Message Service (SMS) and other data is sent via General Packet Radio Service (GPRS). If GPS location signals are not available, locations are derived by GSM triangulation.

When a distress signal is triggered, a signal is sent via GPRS to the Civil Rights Defenders servers in Stockholm. There, the authenticity of the alarm is verified and decisions are made as to what information should be shared or posted on social media platforms. Notifying the local police is not a default action of the distress signal, since in many cases, the local police or government agencies could well be the source of the threat.

Volunteers to the Natalia Project can get involved by signing up to receive notifications of distress signals sent from human rights defenders through several social media networks. The hope is that if the public has more visibility into the continual well being of human rights workers, that those that would attack human rights workers would be aware that their actions are being watched. Knowing the exact time and location of an attack can also help catch the attacker(s) quicker and possibly prevent more killings of human rights workers around the globe.

Three years on, Natalya Estemirova's murder unsolved

The obvious caveat to the bracelet is that it must have cellular coverage in order to transmit an alert. I wonder if it's not possible to re-work the technology used in the bracelet to record periodic GPS coordinates. Then, if an alert had been triggered and the wearer was not in a cellular coverage area, the bracelet could send the last known GPS coordinates. That isn't a perfect solution, but it might be a helpful workaround.