Related Work

There have been several measurement studies of 802.11 WLANs. These studies typically use three types of measurement techniques: WDM (wired monitoring), SNMP and syslogs (AP system logs). WDM has been used for identifying the typical traffic mix in university WLANs 10 (10); 8 (8); 7 (7), or public WLANs 1 (1). SNMP provides information on both traffic volume and the number of active (associated) users, and has thus been used for both traffic studies 10 (10); 1 (1); 8 (8) and user mobility studies 2 (2). Syslog records detail steps of association, and have been used effectively for studying user activity patterns 8 (8); 5 (5).

WM techniques have been used by 6 (6); 4 (4) to measure packet loss and bit error rates in a non-802.11 wireless network. They used a controlled environment to measure traffic between two wireless stations. Our work differs in that it examines a production 802.11 network for MAC traffic characterization and diagnosis.