2nd International ICST Workshop On Wireless Network Measurement

Research Article

Tools and Techniques for Measurement of IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/WIOPT.2006.1666490,
        author={Feng  Li and Mingzhe  Li and Rui Lu  and Huahui Wu and Mark Claypool  and Robert  Kinicki},
        title={Tools and Techniques for Measurement of IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks},
        proceedings={2nd International ICST Workshop On Wireless Network Measurement},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={WINMEE},
        year={2006},
        month={8},
        keywords={},
        doi={10.1109/WIOPT.2006.1666490}
    }
    
  • Feng Li
    Mingzhe Li
    Rui Lu
    Huahui Wu
    Mark Claypool
    Robert Kinicki
    Year: 2006
    Tools and Techniques for Measurement of IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks
    WINMEE
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/WIOPT.2006.1666490
Feng Li1,*, Mingzhe Li1,*, Rui Lu 1,*, Huahui Wu1,*, Mark Claypool 1,*, Robert Kinicki1,*
  • 1: CS Department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, 01609, USA
*Contact email: lif@cs.wpi.edu, lmz@cs.wpi.edu, kkboy@cs.wpi.edu, flashine@cs.wpi.edu, claypool@cs.wpi.edu, rek@cs.wpi.edu

Abstract

With the growing popularity of wireless local area networks (WLANs) has come an increased need for effective measurements of real-world WLANs and their applications. This paper presents tools and techniques for measuring IEEE 802.11 WLANs. The techniques include details on setting up a PC as a wireless access point and building a wireless sniffer while the tools include programs for measuring link, network and application layer traffic. The tools are all open-source software available for download and the techniques all use open-source software and off-the-shelf hardware components. Together, these tools and techniques facilitate WLAN performance analysis across network layers in a flexible, accurate and cost-effective manner. To illustrate the usefulness of these tools and techniques for gathering WLAN measurements three case studies are presented: a streaming video session showing cross-layer performance; network characteristics of a wireless hand-held game; and measurements of access point queue size. Research employing these tools can yield more accurate WLAN models and more realistic evaluation of proposed WLAN changes in a network testbed.