The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Debugging a wireless system is difficult and costly. Debugging a wireless system is difficult due to the high complexity of the radio spectrum and variability in the implementation of wireless networking protocols by client devices. Every few years new protocol standards may be developed and released, making the existing debug infrastructure inadequate because it cannot detect anomalies that are introduced in software that is developed in response to updated standards.
Additionally, debugging a wireless system is costly because traditional debugging techniques may be implemented manually by technicians with minimal software support. Costs associated with manual debugging techniques can be unpredictable and lead to workflow disruptions and increased business costs.
Traditionally, information collection in wireless systems such as packet captures, data logs, and event collections are enabled at all times in the wireless system, or debug information is collected by manually configuring wireless sniffers and enabling logs and packet traces after a bug or anomaly is identified.
These traditional methods for debugging a wireless system are inefficient and error prone. For example, if the system is enabled to collect debug information at all times, valuable computing resources are spent collecting, processing, and sending large amounts of data that will never be utilized. Alternatively, if the system is enabled to collect data such as logs and packet traces after a bug or anomaly is identified, the underlying data relating to the anomaly is not recorded and the anomaly must occur again in order to record the data required to properly troubleshoot the problem. Thus, the existing debugging mechanisms are time consuming, resource expensive, and generally require problem reproduction.
Therefore, there is a need for improved debugging techniques in wireless systems that reduce the use of computing resources, network bandwidth, and overall time and cost of debugging a wireless system.