Demo: Experimental Study of Capture Effect in Smartphones and Wi-Fi Access Points

It is widely known that interference is one of the main problems in dense Wi-Fi networks, where overlapping transmissions are common. Therefore, network performance significantly depends on the mechanism of reception of overlapping frames with different power. Sometimes, the frame with higher power can survive if its receiving power is higher enough than the power of the rest transmitted frames. The ability of a device to receive the stronger frame if it comes later than the weaker one is called capture effect. In this demo paper, we propose a testbed that can be used to figure out how vendors implement the reception mechanism and easily study capture effect for numerous off-the-shelf devices such as smartphones, laptops, and access points.