The 802.11ax amendment was built to increase the efficiency of WiFi. One of the new features is OFDMA or the capability to send data to several stations simultaneously, multi-user operations.
One of the benefits of OFDMA is to decrease the duration it takes to send the data to several stations in relation to single-user operations. Especially for smaller frame sizes, but for which?

In this blog, I will check the trade-off between SU and MU operations in 802.11ax for three typical scenarios.
You will be amazed, I was

I have been selected as one of the finalists for the Cisco 2021 IT Blog Award

The 802.11 Block Acknowledgement frame (BlockAck) is a powerful frame to predict the data flow in a WiFi network, both when the data frames are visible in a frame capture and not.

Let us use Wireshark and the I/O Graph to visualize it

If you really want to dig into 802.11ax frame formats, a wireless capture (pcap) and Wireshark is a great way of doing it.
In this blog, I will dig into the preamble of an 802.11ax frame and point out several items to look at. I will also find information from the first part of the preamble, the legacy preamble

When interpreting wireless captures it is not always easy to capture the data frames because they are usually sent with complex modulation and coding schemes. The quality of the capturing NIC is also important.
But management and control frames are easier to capture because they are sent with legacy frame format (802.11b/g or 802.11a).
The BlockAcknowledge frame (BA) is the frame used by the receiving station to send back to the transmitter the status for what the receiver has received without corruption.
The last two years I have seen two different behaviors for the BA, one according to the standard and the other with a strange behavior
Let us dig into it

Frame capturing of 802.11frames, WiFi, is a important task in managing and troubleshooting WiFi networks. In the earlier days there were different methods of capturing these frames, but now when 802.11ax (WiFi6) is in the marked the variety in methods is limited.

Capturing the management and control types of frames that normally use legacy frame formats like 802.11b/g in the 2.4GHz band and 802.11a in the 5GHz is still easily done, but capturing the data frames with 802.11ax frame format is more tricky.

I will in this blog compare 802.11ax frame capturing using a Jetson Nano with Intel ax200 wireless NIC and a Cisco C9115-AXI in sniffer mode

This is a method of having a SpeedTest service available during AP on a stick survey (APoS), with only an AP, PoE battery, and a WlanPi available

This is probably described earlier, but I do it anyway

This week I was elected by the WiFi community to be the WiFi Awards Rookie of the Year 2020. I am very thankful to all the people who have voted for me and the WiFi Award committee to be one of the finalists.
The WiFi Award has been one of the main factors and motivation for all I have done in the last years. Why?

I have been selected as the finalist for two different awards for 2020, the Cisco 2020 IT Blog Award for Best Analysis and the Wi-Fi Award Rookie of the Year

I have written several blog articles regarding 802.11ax and OFDMA frame capturing with the NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer kit as the method evolved the last months. Now it is time to make a blog article to bring this together, both for my self and others

I will mention the available methods and give some short keywords and useful links