Trying To Access Received Signal Strength of 60GHz Router

For Developers
1

Hello,

I wish to extract the received signal strength of the 60GHz band on my mmWave router. The router model is the Netgear Nighthawk XR700 (http://en.techinfodepot.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Netgear_XR700). I have installed OpenWrt on this router thanks to the help of this github repository: https://github.com/egorenar/openwrt

Unfortunately, the RSS measurements for the 60GHz frequency is not accessible in the userspace, and I've been trying to figure out how to 'hack' into the firmware image and find where this data is stored in the kernel, then make it available to the userspace memory. Is there a solution for this that I could be pointed towards? Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

2

I assume this third party build is using the mainline wil6210 driver:
https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/wil6210

This page does not say whether RSSI is (yet) supported or not. The kernel driver needs to know how to obtain RSSI data from the radio chip (more specifically, the closed-source firmware running on that radio chip's CPU) and have a routine implementing that function. Then it should be accessible to userspace using the standard mac80211 API.

3

Hi mk24,

Thank you for the reply. How would I go about finding where the RSSI data is stored on the radio chip? And thereafter, how would I then implement a routine to carry out a function that would make it accessible in the user space?

4

As a general rule (unless egorenar did something different) OpenWrt's wifi drivers are imported from the Linux kernel project directly. So you should look to those developers and the wil6210 source code.

There is already a standard way to link connection metadata like RSSI from a kernel driver to userspace, so there is no need to reinvent that.