Measuring high-speed network performance with CubieTruck
Truckin'
© Lead Image © Konstantin-Sutyagin, 123RF.com
The CubieTruck small-board PC is a measuring instrument that copes well with Gigabit networks and offers a surprisingly affordable and efficient solution.
Any network infrastructure on which LTE connections are used quickly reaches its limits. The project in this article includes throughput tests; however, because LTE technology supports bandwidths of more than 100Mbps, my MacBook Air was ruled out, because it only has a 100Mb USB Ethernet adapter. The various Raspberry Pis, with 100Mbps interfaces, are not fast enough either, so my task was to find an affordable alternative that ran Linux.
Two single-board computers (SBCs) were on my shortlist: the CubieTruck [1] and the Wandboard [2]. Both small PCs have newer versions – the CubieTruck is the third generation of the Cubie family [3], and versions of the Wandboard also exist with more CPU (performance and cores) and more RAM; both boards offer Gigabit Ethernet. However, I couldn't find a retailer offering the Wandboard, so I finally decided on the CubieTruck (Figure 1).
CubieTruck
Figure 2 shows the CubieTruck package: The board comes with a small, ultrathin heat sink, a SATA cable for connecting hard drives, an OTG cable, a USB cable, a power cable, and a case or mounting plate; the microSD card and the console cable, which proved very valuable for experiments with self-made kernels, come separately.
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