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A comparative analysis of the user behavior in academic WiFi networks

Published: 31 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Wireless local area networks (WLAN) are common in universities and their popularity grows every day. Understanding the trends in the use of these networks (i.e. how much, when and where traffic is present) is becoming more relevant. Interesting results can be extracted by analyzing WLAN traces from real scenarios. In this work, three buildings are studied on two campuses in Barcelona (Spain) and its surroundings. This is the first study providing the user behavior in a European campus. Similar trends are observed in the three buildings, despite the different amount of users, purpose of the building and size of the campus. Daily and weekly patterns are shown. The population accessing the networks is mostly composed of infrequent users: less than half of the devices access the WLAN more than four days during the three months studied. Many users visiting one building associate with only one access point: despite the widespread use of lightweight devices many users are static. The main difference among different buildings is the fidelity of users: users on a small campus are more likely to reappear on different days than on a large campus, where the population is more heterogeneous. The results of this analysis provide general tools for characterizing campus-wide WLAN and a better understanding of usage and performance issues in a mature wireless network in Europe.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      PM2HW2N '11: Proceedings of the 6th ACM workshop on Performance monitoring and measurement of heterogeneous wireless and wired networks
      October 2011
      140 pages
      ISBN:9781450309028
      DOI:10.1145/2069087
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      Publication History

      Published: 31 October 2011

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      Author Tags

      1. WLAN 802.11
      2. WiFi
      3. measurements
      4. real traces
      5. syslog
      6. user behavior

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      • (2022)Optimizing intra-facility crowding in Wi-Fi environments using continuous-time Markov chainsDiscover Internet of Things10.1007/s43926-022-00026-x2:1Online publication date: 12-Sep-2022
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      • (2018)Analysis of User Activity in Wireless Local Area Network of Petrozavodsk State UniversityProceedings of the 22st Conference of Open Innovations Association FRUCT10.5555/3266365.3266370(34-39)Online publication date: 21-May-2018
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