An Empirical Analysis of Wi-Fi Activity in Three Urban Scenarios

—A better understanding of people’s daily behaviors with respect to the underlying wireless network is a crucial step toward Wi-Fi based pervasive networking. Existing analyses found in the literature have focused on closed environments such as university campuses, offices, or conferences. This paper develops a new approach to analyze Wi-Fi user behaviors in the wild based on wireless sniffing. With our technique, we are able to investigate Wi-Fi activity in areas usually inaccessible to traditional systems. Moreover, instead of focusing on a single network, we capture behaviors of all users around specific locations regardless of their relationship with existing networks. We show the potential of our approach by analyzing Wi-Fi activity in three environments with different sociological means: an office area, a sparse residential area, and a dense residential area. Our results reveal unseen and unexpected properties: (a) for two of the environments, the discovery rate of new us...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: PERCOM
• Authors: Thomas Claveirole, Mathias Boc, Marcelo Dias de Amorim
• Keywords: Behaviors, PERCOM 2009, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Activity, Wireless Networks