OpenWrt Forum Archive

Topic: Broadcom wl command set

The content of this topic has been archived on 25 Mar 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

Post #1
ntadayon
9 Mar 2017, 20:17

Hi everyone,
I am a researcher at MIT working on a wireless channel estimation problem for IEEE 802.11ac adapter. To that end, I am inclined to use Broadcom chipset. As you might know, Broadcom has a proprietary driver (Broadcom-STA or Broadcom-wl-dkms) that comes with a utility command set which provides some monitoring-level access to the firmware. I was hoping to be able to use this command set in an scripting language, put bunch of them together, and be able to extract channel state information (CSI) from the firmware. Now, does anyone have any experience with this command set? If so, do you know whether the newer IEEE 802.11ac adapters are supported by it?

Particularly, there is this command "wl channel_qa" which seems to be relevant. The problem is I am not even sure whether channel quality measurements that is returned by this commend has anything to do with the matrix of CSI that should be comprised of complex measurements on sub-carriers. There is also no report in internet about the details of the returned information by this command. If anyone knows anything about this specific command or the whole command set, please be kind and share. I need your insight..
Thanks in advance.

Post #2
stangri
9 Mar 2017, 20:32

I'd recommend cross-posting (ONCE) in LEDE Project forum and possibly the mail-list.

(Last edited by stangri on 9 Mar 2017, 20:37)

Post #3
ntadayon
9 Mar 2017, 20:41

Thanks. I posted on LEDE (hardware category). What is the mail-list? (Sorry I am new to this site)

Post #4
mazilo
9 Mar 2017, 20:43
ntadayon wrote:

Hi everyone,
I am a researcher at MIT working on a wireless channel estimation problem for IEEE 802.11ac adapter. To that end, I am inclined to use Broadcom chipset. As you might know, Broadcom has a proprietary driver (Broadcom-STA or Broadcom-wl-dkms) that comes with a utility command set which provides some monitoring-level access to the firmware. I was hoping to be able to use this command set in an scripting language, put bunch of them together, and be able to extract channel state information (CSI) from the firmware. Now, does anyone have any experience with this command set? If so, do you know whether the newer IEEE 802.11ac adapters are supported by it?

Particularly, there is this command "wl channel_qa" which seems to be relevant. The problem is I am not even sure whether channel quality measurements that is returned by this commend has anything to do with the matrix of CSI that should be comprised of complex measurements on sub-carriers. There is also no report in internet about the details of the returned information by this command. If anyone knows anything about this specific command or the whole command set, please be kind and share. I need your insight..
Thanks in advance.

Just a friendly reminder. You seemed to have cross posted the other two posts and I have removed them due to a violation of OpenWRT ToS.

Post #5
AlexMa
20 Mar 2017, 07:27

I believe that Broadcom driver don't support CSI info. The CSI info is normally handled by the IC directly, not even the firmware. Only Intel 5300 and Atheros chipsets with debug and unstable firmware have the CSI info.

The discussion might have continued from here.