I recently started using a Raspberry Pi 3B+ and it's new 802.11ac capabilities to set up an access point in the 5GHz band.

For testing and evaluating the enormous amount of features which hostapd supports I created a small script which spins up an AP, let's an client connect to it and then measure the throughput.

The repository can be found at: gitlab.com/lheim/hostapd-config-test/

See below the README.md.

hostapd-config-test

Script to test different hostapd configs and their performance.

See notes.md for RB Pi 3B+ related notes.

measurement.sh

Main script which starts a hostapd daemon, waits for a client, runs multiple iperf3 measurements and then plots them.

1. Make sure to generate ssh keys before and exchange them with the client.

ssh-keygen
ssh-copy-id pi@PI3-5GHz-02

Modify the Client IP in measurement.sh

Create a hostapd.conf with the settings to test (cp hostapd-sample.conf hostapd.conf).

Start the script: sudo ./measurement.sh foldername - where foldername is the name of the folder where the logs get stored.

Requirements

• hostapd
• iperf3 (on AP and client)
• python3
• python3-pip
• matplotlib
• numpy

TL;DR:

sudo apt-get install hostapd iperf3 python3 python3-pip
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
sudo ./measurement.sh foldername

File descriptions

client-script.sh

Script which gets executed on the client (which connects to the AP). Please configure the wpa-supplicant on the client before.

plot-iperf.py

Python script to plot the json logfiles of iperf3 (uses matplotlib).

hostapd-sample.conf

Sample hostapd config with the bare minimum settings to create an 802.11ac (5 GHz) AP on RPi3B+.