How is wireless signal strength for NetworkManager calculated in Fedora?

Question

How wireless signal strength (as displayed by the network-manager applet) is calculated. There is a percentage reported: what does this percent mean and where does NetworkManager get its values from?

Answer 1

Not sure if this is still relevant, but it was part of the early development of NetworkManager.

http://www.ces.clemson.edu/linux/nm-ipw2200.shtml

Answer 2

For what it's worth, wireless signal indicators are rarely simply just "signal strength" indicators, but are usually a combination of things that represent "signal goodness."

While strength is part of the equation, there's also a quality aspect, which may take into account - noise, transmission/reception errors, connection speed, etc. So, what might appear to be the best access point, out of a selection of access points, where you have a little bar graph on each, and one has more bars than another. It *may* not necessarily indicate which will work best for you (were you in a position of having to choose one out of many that you could use, rather than the usually simply having to choose the one that is for your network versus someone else's).