A Comparative Measurement Study of the Workload of Wireless Access Points in Campus Networks

Abstract:
Our goal is to perform a system-wide characterization of the workload of wireless access points (APs) in a production 802.11 infrastructure. The key issues of this study are the characterization of the traffic at each access point (AP), its modeling, and a comparison among APs of different wireless campus-wide infrastructures. Unlike most other studies, we compare two networks using similar data acquisition techniques and analysis methods. This makes the results more generally applicable. We analyzed the aggregate traffic load of APs and found that the log normality is prevalent. The distributions of the wireless received and sent traffic load for these infrastructures are similar. Furthermore, we discovered a dichotomy of APs: there are APs with the majority of clients that are uploaders and APs in which the majority of their clients are downloaders. Also, the number of non-unicast wireless packets and the percentage of roaming events is large. Finally, there is a correlation between the number of associations and traffic load in the log-log scale.