Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

9-2004

Publication Title

Proceedings of the Tenth Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom) (MobiCom)

Department

Department of Computer Science

Abstract

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are now commonplace on many academic and corporate campuses. As “Wi-Fi” technology becomes ubiquitous, it is increasingly important to understand trends in the usage of these networks. \par This paper analyzes an extensive network trace from a mature 802.11 WLAN, including more than 550 access points and 7000 users over seventeen weeks. We employ several measurement techniques, including syslogs, telephone records, SNMP polling and tcpdump packet sniffing. This is the largest WLAN study to date, and the first to look at a large, mature WLAN and consider geographic mobility. We compare this trace to a trace taken after the network's initial deployment two years ago. \par We found that the applications used on the WLAN changed dramatically. Initial WLAN usage was dominated by Web traffic; our new trace shows significant increases in peer-to-peer, streaming multimedia, and voice over IP (VoIP) traffic. On-campus traffic now exceeds off-campus traffic, a reversal of the situation at the WLAN's initial deployment. Our study indicates that VoIP has been used little on the wireless network thus far, and most VoIP calls are made on the wired network. Most calls last less than a minute. \par We saw greater heterogeneity in the types of clients used, with more embedded wireless devices such as PDAs and mobile VoIP clients. We define a new metric for mobility, the “session diameter.” We use this metric to show that embedded devices have different mobility characteristics than laptops, and travel further and roam to more access points. Overall, users were surprisingly non-mobile, with half remaining close to home about 98% of the time.

DOI

10.1145/1023720.1023739

Original Citation

Tristan Henderson, David Kotz, and Ilya Abyzov. The Changing Usage of a Mature Campus-Wide Wireless Network. In Proceedings of the Tenth Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom), September 2004. DOI 10.1145/1023720.1023739.

Download
COinS