Hardware test environment

Figure 1: Physical layout for performance tests

The hardware test environment consisted of two Apple Powerbook laptops, an apple 802.11b airport base station, and a Linksys WRT54G 802.11g wireless base station. Both Powerbooks were running Debian Linux with the 2.6.9 Linux kernel. The primary test machine had a 1.5Ghz CPU with a NetGear WG511 wireless-g card based on the Prism54 chipset (which has an open-source Linux driver). The machine used to generate noise traffic was a 600Mhz Powerbook with internal 802.11b airport card (using the open-source hermes/airport driver). Figure 1 shows the physical layout for the tests. The G-AP was configured on channel 1, and the B-AP was configured on channel 2. This was to force conflicting channels such that neither MAC layer could recognize the other and prevent collision detection from occurring, and for the MAC layer to treat traffic on the other channel as interfering noise.