Jigsaw: solving the puzzle of enterprise 802.11 analysis

By Yuchung Cheng, J. Bellardo, Péter Benkö, Alex C. Snoeren, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage. Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, 2006

367 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The combination of unlicensed spectrum, cheap wireless interfaces and the inherent convenience of untethered computing have made 802.11 based networks ubiquitous in the enterprise. Modern universities, corporate campuses and government offices routinely de-ploy scores of access points to blanket their sites with wireless Internet access. However, while the fine-grained behavior of the 802.11 protocol itself has been well studied, our understanding of how large 802.11 networks behave in their full empirical complex-ity is surprisingly limited. In this paper, we present a system called Jigsaw that uses multiple monitors to provide a single unified view of all physical, link, network and transport-layer activity on an 802.11 network. To drive this analysis, we have deployed an infrastructure of over 150 radio monitors that simultaneously capture all 802.11b and 802.11g activity in a large university building (1M+ cubic feet). We describe the challenges posed by both the scale and ambiguity inherent in such an architecture, and explain the algorithms and inference techniques we developed to address them. Finally, using a 24-hour distributed trace containing more than 1.5 billion events, we use Jigsaw's global cross-layer viewpoint to isolate performance artifacts, both explicit, such as management inefficiencies, and implicit, such as co-channel interference. We believe this is the first analysis combining this scale and level of detail for a production 802.11 network.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/011b192e64e02b123445d9ff12cfd8d4109f763c

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In Computer Networks and Communications

Citations in the corpus

CitySense: An Urban-Scale Wireless Sensor Network and Testbed (2008, background): “Much like Jigsaw [15] and DAIR [10], which are intended to monitor and diagnose indoor enterprise networks, CitySense could be used to monitor chaotically deployed WiFi networks in and around a city.”
Full duplex techniques for 5G networks: self-interference cancellation, protocol design, and relay selection (2015, background): “The asynchronous nature of successive collisions can be successfully exploited in ZigZag to address the problem of high packet loss rate (PLR).”
The changing usage of a mature campus-wide wireless network (2004, methodology): “11 wireless measurements [10,20,29,18,7], these have typically taken place in laboratory or small-scale conditions, and there is little wireless monitoring of a large campus WLAN.”