Analysis of a local-area wireless network

By Diane Tang, Mary Baker. ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, 2000

442 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To understand better how users take advantage of wireless networks, we examine a twelve-week trace of a building-wide local-area wireless network. We analyze the network for overall user behavior (when and how intensively people use the network and how much they move around), overall network traffic and load characteristics (observed throughput and symmetry of incoming and outgoing traffic), and traffic characteristics from a user point of view (observed mix of applications and number of hosts connected to by users). Amongst other results, we find that users are divided into distinct location-based sub-communities, each with its own movement, activity, and usage characteristics. Most users exploit the network for web-surfing, session-oriented activities and chat-oriented activities. The high number of chat-oriented activities shows that many users take advantage of the mobile network for synchronous communication with others. In addition to these user-specific results, we find that peak throughput is usually caused by a single user and application. Also, while incoming traffic dominates outgoing traffic overall, the opposite tends to be true during periods of peak throughput, implying that significant asymmetry in network capacity could be undesirable for our users. While these results are only valid for this local-area wireless network and user community, we believe that similar environments may exhibit similar behavior and trends. We hope that our observations will contribute to a growing understanding of mobile user behavior.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bbd6be90d87b8f210770141760bb5eb96457195c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Networks and Communications

Citations in the corpus

Polaris: a system for query, analysis and visualization of multi-dimensional relational databases (2000, methodology): “We have used Polaris with two reasonably large data sets: 1) a subset of a packet trace of a mobile network over a 13 week period [ 35 ] that has over 6 million tuples and 2) a subset of the data collected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (approx.”
Understanding packet delivery performance in dense wireless sensor networks (2003, background): “Measurements of infrastructure based wireless networks have been studied in [13, 21].”
Application of Extreme Value Theory to the Analysis of Wireless Network Traffic (2007, methodology): “This is a twelve-week wireless trace collected from the CS department of Stanford University [ 2 ] in the Fall quarter of 2002.”
Reliability Analysis of DSRC Wireless Communication for Vehicle Safety Applications (2006, background): “The application rangeD for warning message coverage and tolerance time window T to receive the warning message, for different applications, are listed in Table I.”
The changing usage of a mature campus-wide wireless network (2004, methodology): “We use this metric to show that embedded devices have different mobility characteristics than laptops, and travel further and roam to more access points.”
Predictive distance-based mobility management for multidimensional PCS networks (2003, background): “For example, mobile traces reported in [27] and [28] only give coarse movement patterns between large areas, in hourly to daily time frames, aggregated among many users.”
A case for adapting channel width in wireless networks (2008, background): “Recent measurements have shown that there exists spatial and temporal disparity in client distributions [3, 16, 21 ] in large-scale WLANs.”
Jigsaw: solving the puzzle of enterprise 802.11 analysis (2006, background): “We are unaware of any production wireless network monitored at similar scale.”
Preemptive routing in Ad Hoc networks (2001, methodology): “The traffic sources used were telnet-like (using the telnet agents in NS2) – Tang and Baker showed that much of the traffic on a local area wireless network was of this type [22].”