Overview

Introduction

This Application Performance Analyzer is a serial interface based application, which communicates with Performance Analyzer to demonstrate various features and capabilities of Atmel Transceivers such as:

• Range of the Transceiver for peer-to-peer communication (Range Measurement)
• Robust Link Quality
• Antenna Diversity
• TX Power of Radio
• Rx Sensitivity
• CSMA-CA Transmission
• Read / Write Transceiver Registers
• Continuous transmit test modes
• Reduced Power Consumption mode
• Energy Detection
• Cyclic Redundancy Check
• Battery Monitor

Based on the roles and functionalities the wireless node can be configured as:
1) Transmitter which is connected to the performance analyzer,takes the user events like key press to find its peer node(i.e. Reflector) in Range measurement mode or 'Initiate Peer search' command from the Performance Analyzer to find its peer node in PER mode.
2) Reflector which is not connected to the Performance Analyzer, receives peer request from the transmitter and participates in the peer search process to get paired with the transmitter node.
3) Single Node which is connected to the performance analyzer and receives 'Continue As single node' command from the user, will start as a standalone node in which only minimal set of testing can be performed.
Performance Analyzer mainly works in three operating modes which are Range Measurement mode, Packet Error rate measurement (PER) mode and single node mode.

• Range Measurement mode is to evaluate the communication coverage area of the transceiver. During Range Measurement, on key press the Transmitter node will initiate a procedure to find a peer node. Once peer node is found, packet transmission is initiated by the node on which the key press was detected initially, acts as Transmitter node. The other node acts as Reflector, receives the packets and acknowledges each packet received. The LED on the Reflector will blink sequentially and repeat at the rate at which the packets are received. The LED on the Transmitter will blink sequentially and repeat at the rate at which the packets are transmitted. By moving the Reflector away from Transmitter, user can find the transceiver's communication coverage area by observing the LED blinking on the Reflector node. The LED on Reflector will stop blinking when Reflector node is out of range. A key press on the Reflector node also initiates packet transmission continuously from Reflector node. Once the transmission is initiated from a node, any time it can be stopped or started by pressing the same key again. The number of frames transmitted and received in a particular node can be checked by connecting the nodes to HyperTerminal anytime.
  
• Packet Error Rate Measurement (PER) is to evaluate the packet transmission and reception capabilities of the wireless nodes. The Transmitter node shall be connected to the Performance Analyzer. If 'Initiate Peer search' command is received from the analyzer after the board is connected, then the node (Transmitter) tries to find its peer node (i.e. Reflector). The Procedure to find and get paired with the Peer node is explained in the user guide. Once peer node is found and paired, a menu will appear on the Performance Analyzer including the details of the Board it is paired with. Using the menu options user can configure various parameters like channel, channel page, frame length, no. of frames etc. and start the PER test. User also can evaluate the transceiver by enabling, disabling various features like CSMA-CA, RPC, antenna diversity etc. Whenever the parameters are changed from the transmitter side through analyzer, the same will be reflected in the reflector node also. User can see the changes in reflector node if it is connected to HyperTerminal.The PER Mode Supports Features/Tests such as:
  PER Test where the configured payload is transmitted and the PER Results are plotted as a graph.
  ED Scan where the Supported channels can be selected to perform an energy detection scanning.
  CW Mode for performing CW transmission ,it supports Single Pulse CW Transmission ,CW and PRBS(Pseudo Random Binary Sequence) Modes of Operation.
  Range Test Mode : This mode is different from the Range Measurement Mode described earlier.In this mode Beacons(Periodic Data Frames) are transmitted for every 3 seconds,the receptor node receives these beacons,calculates the LQI and ED and sends back to the Initiator which are displayed.On button press from the receptor node a Marker Command is sent and the LQI and ED values of the Marker are displayed so that the user can position himself to determine the area of maximum energy and quality.
  
• Single Node mode If the user wants to evaluate some of the transceiver features with single node by giving the command 'Continue as Single Node' in Performance Analyzer or If the peer search process by the transmitter is timed out (No Peer Response received within the time out) the node starts as a single node. In this state user will be able to evaluate the transceiver features for which no peer node is needed e.g. Continuous Wave transmission, Energy scan on all/required channels, TX power settings,reading/writing transceiver registers,etc.
  
• Configuration mode Configuration mode is the startup mode in which two nodes(i.e Transmitter and Reflector) can connect each other if they are only within in the vicinity of one meter approximately.This is to restrict the distance range for connecting devices. User can enter into configuration mode by pressing the button while Power on /reset.After this the node can pair with any other node in PER or range measurement mode as usual. Then the device (transmitter) shall go to the low TX level (TX_PWR = 0x0F) and sends the peer request with the config_mode bit set to true. On the other device (reflector), if the peer request received with config_mode bit true, it checks the ED level and if it is above defined threshold, it will connect with the transmitter device. Once the Peer Search is done successfully, the nodes shall come to the normal mode where the nodes can be kept far.