Abstract

Wireless networks, including IEEE 802.11 (WiFi), continue to become more important for many uses, including university classrooms. Factors that impact the performance of these networks have changed greatly over time, with increased scale at which they are used, and growing dependence of latency sensitive applications. In order to better understand the performance of current WiFi networks, a methodology was created to capture and analyze beacon frames with optional 802.11e information elements (IE), using Quality of Service enhanced Basic Service Set or QBSS load (channel utilization) and station count. This methodology is able to collect channel use more frequently than many available tools and can use existing infrastructure. Using this methodology, classrooms at a large university were analyzed to find channel utilization values and to show the correlation between channel utilization, station count, beacon rate, and registered student count. We found that the beacon rate only decreased significantly when channel utilization was greater than 50%, and the correlation between station count and channel utilization is much weaker than expected. 66% of the class sessions were found to have at least 1 second of very high channel utilization, but only 0.13% of the total class time was in this category. In addition, the median station count was 20 per radio, with an average of 1.43 associated stations per enrolled student. The results suggest that wireless networks in this environment perform well overall, but improvement can be made by addressing minor issues found through analysis, and we explore the potential impact of implementing the 6 GHz band in wireless designs.

Degree

College and Department

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering; Electrical and Computer Engineering

Rights

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