With the growing popularity of wireless local area networks (WLANs) has come an increased need for effective measurements of real-world WLANs and their applications. This paper presents tools and techniques for measuring IEEE 802.11 WLANs. The techniques include details on setting up a PC as a wireless access point and building a wireless sniffer while the tools include programs for measuring link, network and application layer traffic. The tools are all open-source software available for download and the techniques all use open-source software and off-the-shelf hardware components. Together, these tools and techniques facilitate WLAN performance analysis across network layers in a flexible, accurate and cost-effective manner. To illustrate the usefulness of these tools and techniques for gathering WLAN measurements three case studies are presented: a streaming video session showing cross-layer performance; network characteristics of a wireless hand-held game; and measurements of access point queue size. Research employing these tools can yield more accurate WLAN models and more realistic evaluation of proposed WLAN changes in a network testbed.

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See also:

• The Network Measurement Tools associated with this paper.

• Other Wireless Publications

• Other downloads of traces and code that may be useful.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number CNS-0423362. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).