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
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.
