RSSI

In telecommunications, received signal strength indicator (RSSI) is a measurement of the power present in a received radio signal.^[1]

RSSI is a generic radio receiver technology metric, which is usually invisible to the user of the device containing the receiver, but is directly known to users of wireless networking of IEEE 802.11 protocol family.

RSSI is often done in the intermediate frequency (IF) stage before the IF amplifier. In zero-IF systems, it is done in the baseband signal chain, before the baseband amplifier. RSSI output is often a DC analog level. It can also be sampled by an internal ADC and the resulting codes available directly or via peripheral or internal processor bus.

[edit]RSSI in 802.11 implementations

In an IEEE 802.11 system RSSI is the relative received signal strength in a wireless environment, in arbitrary units. RSSI is an indication of the power level being received by the antenna. Therefore, the higher the RSSI number (or less negative in some devices), the stronger the signal.

RSSI can be used internally in a wireless networking card to determine when the amount of radio energy in the channel is below a certain threshold at which point the network card is clear to send (CTS). Once the card is clear to send, a packet of information can be sent. The end-user will likely observe a RSSI value when measuring the signal strength of a wireless network through the use of a wireless network monitoring tool like Wireshark, Kismet or Inssider. As an example, Cisco Systems cards have a RSSI_Max value of 100 and will report 101 different power levels, where the RSSI value is 0 to 100. Another popular Wi-Fi chipset is made by Atheros. An Atheros based card will return an RSSI value of 0 to 127 (0x7f) with 128 (0x80) indicating an invalid value.

There is no standardized relationship of any particular physical parameter to the RSSI reading. The 802.11 standard does not define any relationship between RSSI value and power level in mW or dBm. Vendors provide their own accuracy, granularity, and range for the actual power (measured as mW or dBm) and their range of RSSI values (from 0 to RSSI_Max). One subtlety of the 802.11 RSSI metric comes from how it is sampled - RSSI is acquired during only the preamble stage of receiving an 802.11 frame, not over the full frame. A study in 2009 showed that RSSI cannot necessarily be used to reliably gauge distances in a wireless sensor network.^[2]

For the most part, 802.11 RSSI has been replaced with Received Channel Power Indicator. RCPI is an 802.11^[3] measure of the received RF power in a selected channel over the preamble and the entire received frame, and has defined absolute levels of accuracy and resolution. RCPI is exclusively associated with 802.11 and as such has some accuracy and resolution enforced on it through IEEE 802.11k-2008. Received signal power level assessment is a necessary step in establishing a link for communication between wireless nodes. However, a power level metric like RCPI generally can't comment on the quality of the link like other metrics such as travel time measurement (ToA).