The WiFi Pilot 802.11 Wireless Troubleshooting Solution

By combining the 802.11 capture capabilities of AirPcap, the spectrum-level visibility of Wi-Spy, the visualization, drill-down and reporting features of CACE Pilot, and Wireshark’s vast collection of protocol dissectors, CACE Technologies and MetaGeek have created the WiFi Pilot bundle, a complete wireless network analysis troubleshooting solution.

With WiFi Pilot, you can:

• Measure wireless channel utilization from the data and spectrum points of view simultaneously
• Ensure safe , compliant, optimized operation of your wireless network
• Easily identify rogue wireless networks and stations
• Instantly detect 802.11 performance bottlenecks with sophisticated triggers and alerts
• Move through long-duration View metrics using WiFi Pilots unique Time Control feature
• Troubleshoot advanced issues like malfunctioning roaming with multiple AirPcap adapters
• Provide professional, detailed reporting to clients and managers

WiFi Pilot Bundle Components

WiFi Pilot: The Heart of the Solution

The WiFi Pilot analyzer is the core of the WiFi Pilot Bundle. A wireless-only subset of the popular CACE Pilot network analysis, visualization, and reporting tool, WiFi Pilot provides the same rich GUI with all of the display, drill-down, and reporting features, but with an 802.11, MAC-level-specific focus.

AirPcap: Unparalleled Wireless Traffic Capture

WiFi Pilot works exclusively with the AirPcap Family of WLAN packet capture adapters under Windows. The AirPcap Family, ranging from an 802.11b/g capture-only adapter to an 802.11a/b/g/n capture and injection adapter with two external MC-Card connectors for optional antennas, are USB-based and capture full 802.11 data, management, and control frames.

Thanks to the integration with AirPcap adapters, WiFi Pilot is the only product to offer full multi-channel packet capture from a laptop-based system.

Wi-Spy: Robust Spectrum Analysis

The Wi-Spy USB-based adapter and Chanalyzer software adds industry-leading spectrum analysis to the WiFi Pilot Solution. With Wi-Spy, you can easily find the open channel and minimize interference when installing, maintaining, or troubleshooting 802.11 networks. Depending on the Wi-Spy adapter chosen, you can track all radio activity from devices operating in the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz band, including Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, cordless phones, sensor networks and automation devices. MetaGeek's Chanalyzer 3.x software graphically displays which channels to use and which ones to avoid by obtaining real-time radio data and by identifying interfering devices.

The WiFi Pilot Bundle includes either Wi-Spy 2.4i (802.11b/g, Chanalyzer Lite), Wi-Spy 2.4x (802.11b/g, external antenna, Chanalyzer 3.2), or Wi-Spy DBx (802.11a/b/g/n, external antenna, Chanalyzer 3.2).

WiFi Pilot Features and Benefits

WiFi Pilot and the AirPcap adapters are fully integrated with Wireshark, allowing you to leverage your team’s existing expertise with the world’s most widely-deployed network analyzer. Using WiFi Pilot’s innovative Channel selection interface, you have complete control of your AirPcap adapters while capturing with Wireshark. Wireshark’s prodigious dissector library for deep 802.11 packet analysis and the corresponding display filters are available for use within WiFi Pilot.

WiFi Pilot includes a complete collection of interactive Charts including bar, pie, and strip charts, conversation rings, scatter diagrams and grids. Intuitive point-and-click process for selecting elements within a Chart, such as bars within a bar chart or time intervals within a strip chart giving rise to a powerful visual filtering mechanism.

Drill-down on both live and trace file sources is one of the most powerful and unique features in WiFi Pilot. Drill-down occurs when you apply a View to a selection made within a Chart. This powerful paradigm multiplies your analysis capabilities. WiFi Pilot’s drill-down feature allows you to analyze very large trace files, quickly guiding you to anomalous network behavior.

WiFi Pilot offers a rich set of reporting facilities fully integrated with WiFi Pilot Views, enabling you to easily and quickly create professional reports in a variety of formats including Word, Excel, and PDF from on-screen displays. You also can include your own annotations in your reports to tailor them to your customer’s or manager’s needs.

Viewing network traffic metrics computed over days, weeks, and months can be challenging. With WiFi Pilot’s “back-in-time” capability, you can easily move through View metrics over extended periods of time with just a few mouse clicks. Based on the selected time interval, sub-sampling and data aggregation techniques are used to optimize the granularity of the visual presentation of View metrics. The “back-in-time” capability can be applied to live and off-line traffic metrics.

WiFi Pilot includes a sophisticated triggering and alerting technology called “Watches.” Create a Watch (trigger plus action) on many MAC and Wireless View metrics and be alerted based on a trigger condition computed on the metric. For example, you can be alerted on high bandwidth, number of retransmissions, signal strength, and more. When a Watch detects that a trigger condition has been met, an action will be executed. Actions include event logging, sending email, and starting a packet capture.