Wireshark

Wireshark is a free network packet capture and analysis system. We use Wireshark to measure network traffic between various computers, such as the traffic between a robot's control computer and a user's workstation.

Installation

To install on an Ubuntu/Debian system:

$ sudo apt-get install wireshark

Use

To run (this is not very safe, but since all the traffic is local, this should be OK for testing purposes):

$ sudo wireshark

In most cases, you will want to setup a capture filter so you only capture packets being sent between the 'robot' to the 'workstation' - this way, you can ignore whatever other traffic your computers are putting out. An example of such a filter is the following:

(ip src host 192.168.0.1 and ip dst host 192.168.0.2) or (ip src host 192.168.0.2 and ip dst host 192.168.0.1)

If you only care about traffic going in one direction, then you'll only need to use half of the above filter, such as:

(ip src host 192.168.0.1 and ip dst host 192.168.0.2)

Once you've set up a capture filter, start a capture. Usually, you'll want to run the capture for a set period of time - the longer the better, although this will result in a lot more data being collected.

After the capture is complete, we usually want to find out the average data rate in bits/second, which can be found in the "Statistics" menu under "Summary".