[robocup-legged] Wireless rules at RoboCup 2007

[Walter Nistico]

Dear All,
This year the technical committee decided to strictly enforce the rule about
the maximum wireless network bandwidth allowed per team during a match,
which is 500kbs, including all TCP and UDP traffic.
What this means is that the traffic of each team will be logged during the
matches, and if a team exceeds the amount specified by the rules, the result
of the game will be an automatic forfeit.
The tool that we will use to log the traffic is Wireshark
(http://www.wireshark.org/), which is a freeware tool so everybody is
encouraged to verify the amount of traffic generated by his/her team and
take the proper countermeasures in case the limit is exceeded (for example,
reduce the transmission frequency, or play without wireless communication).
Please note that the wireless card you use to monitor the traffic must
support promiscuous mode, if you want to be able to log TCP traffic.
All this is necessary, not only to ensure that both teams in a match have
the possibility to make a fair use of the wireless network, but also because
a high network traffic tends to severely slow down the processing of all the
robots on the network (including the opponents) due to issues of the
wireless card driver of the Aibo ERS-7.
Greetings,
Walter

Eng. Walter Nistico
Robotics Research Institute (IRF)
Information Technology Section
Dortmund University
Otto-Hahn Str. 8
44221 Dortmund, Germany
Phone: +49 231 7554533
Fax: +49 231 7553251