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Analyzing the MAC-level behavior of wireless networks in the wild

Authors:

David Wetherall,

John ZahorjanAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCOMM '06: Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications

Pages 75 - 86

https://doi.org/10.1145/1159913.1159923

Published: 11 August 2006 Publication History

Abstract

We present Wit, a non-intrusive tool that builds on passive monitoring to analyze the detailed MAC-level behavior of operational wireless networks. Wit uses three processing steps to construct an enhanced trace of system activity. First, a robust merging procedure combines the necessarily incomplete views from multiple, independent monitors into a single, more complete trace of wireless activity. Next, a novel inference engine based on formal language methods reconstructs packets that were not captured by any monitor and determines whether each packet was received by its destination. Finally, Wit derives network performance measures from this enhanced trace; we show how to estimate the number of stations competing for the medium. We assess Wit with a mix of real traces and simulation tests. We find that merging and inference both significantly enhance the originally captured trace. We apply Wit to multi-monitor traces from a live network to show how it facilitates 802.11 MAC analyses that would otherwise be difficult or rely on less accurate heuristics.

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Cited By

Syed MFladenmuller ADias de Amorim M(2023)Unity is strengthAd Hoc Networks10.1016/j.adhoc.2023.103287151:COnline publication date: 1-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.adhoc.2023.103287
Syed MFladenmuller ADe Amorim M(2022)Assessing the Completeness of Passive Wi-Fi Traffic Capture2022 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC)10.1109/IWCMC55113.2022.9824970(961-966)Online publication date: 30-May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/IWCMC55113.2022.9824970
Song LStriegel AMohammed A(2021)Sniffing Only Control Packets: A Lightweight Client-Side WiFi Traffic Characterization SolutionIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2020.30416718:8(6536-6548)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2020.3041671
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Index Terms

Analyzing the MAC-level behavior of wireless networks in the wild
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Measurement
    2. Metrics

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Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SIGCOMM '06: Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications

September 2006

458 pages

ISBN:1595933085

DOI:10.1145/1159913

General Chair:
Luigi Rizzo
Università di Pisa, Italy
,
Program Chairs:
Tom Anderson
University of Washington, USA
,
Nick McKeown
Stanford University, USA

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 36, Issue 4
Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
October 2006
445 pages
ISSN:0146-4833
DOI:10.1145/1151659
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 11 August 2006

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SIGCOMM06

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SIGCOMM06: ACM SIGCOMM 2006 Conference

September 11 - 15, 2006

Pisa, Italy

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Overall Acceptance Rate 462 of 3,389 submissions, 14%

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Cited By

Syed MFladenmuller ADias de Amorim M(2023)Unity is strengthAd Hoc Networks10.1016/j.adhoc.2023.103287151:COnline publication date: 1-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.adhoc.2023.103287
Syed MFladenmuller ADe Amorim M(2022)Assessing the Completeness of Passive Wi-Fi Traffic Capture2022 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC)10.1109/IWCMC55113.2022.9824970(961-966)Online publication date: 30-May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/IWCMC55113.2022.9824970
Song LStriegel AMohammed A(2021)Sniffing Only Control Packets: A Lightweight Client-Side WiFi Traffic Characterization SolutionIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2020.30416718:8(6536-6548)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2020.3041671
Mehrotra NGraves ESwami ASabharwal A(2021)Minimax Bounds for Blind Network Inference2021 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT)10.1109/ISIT45174.2021.9518065(1823-1828)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ISIT45174.2021.9518065
Li RWang JChen J(2020)Movable Platform-Based Topology Detection for a Geographic Routing Wireless Sensor NetworkSensors10.3390/s2013372620:13(3726)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2020
https://doi.org/10.3390/s20133726
Trivedi NPanigrahi BRath H(2020)WiNetSense: Sensing and Analysis Model for Large-scale Wireless NetworksIEEE INFOCOM 2020 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)10.1109/INFOCOMWKSHPS50562.2020.9162871(787-792)Online publication date: Jul-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOMWKSHPS50562.2020.9162871
Song LMohammed AStriegel A(2020)A Passive Client Side Control Packet-based WiFi Traffic Characterization MechanismICC 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)10.1109/ICC40277.2020.9148619(1-7)Online publication date: Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICC40277.2020.9148619
Allahdadi AMorla R(2019)Anomaly Detection and Modeling in 802.11 Wireless NetworksJournal of Network and Systems Management10.1007/s10922-018-9455-227:1(3-38)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10922-018-9455-2
Maity MRaman BVutukuru MChaurasia ASrivastava R(2018)Witals: AP-Centric Health Diagnosis of WiFi NetworksIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2017.273915217:4(975-989)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2017.2739152
Caol CGong WDong WYu JChen CLiu J(2018)Network Measurement in Multihop Wireless Networks with Lossy and Correlated LinksIEEE INFOCOM 2018 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM.2018.8485835(1340-1348)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/INFOCOM.2018.8485835
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