IEEE 802.11 Traffic Measurement and Analysis

Abstract

Despite extensive measurement based study of IEEE 802.11 wireless channels, rare work has performed to investigate the use of IEEE 802.11 protocol variants in practice and its traffics in various environments. This paper presents a traffic analysis on two different IEEE 802.11 networks under operation: one is inside a university campus and the other is out of the campus. The investigation focuses are on protocol efficiency, frame delivery, application types and IEEE 802.11 variants (i.e. a/b/g/n/ac/ad). With more than 10 million frames collected, the results show: (1) the IEEE 802.11 protocol could be more efficiency with a smaller retry limit, (2) various environments vary largely in traffic application types in that the users have various needs, and (3) users upgrades their devices quickly because the traffic dominates with latest IEEE 802.11 protocol variant. These observations will be valuable to future protocol design of IEEE 802.11 networking.