Analysis of a mixed-use urban wifi network: when metropolitan becomes neapolitan

ABSTRACT

While WiFi was initially designed as a local-area access network, mesh networking technologies have led to increasingly expansive deployments of WiFi networks. In urban environments, the WiFi mesh frequently supplements a number of existing access technologies, including wired broadband networks, 3G cellular, and commercial WiFi hotspots. It is an open question what role city-wide WiFi deployments play in the increasingly diverse access network spectrum. We study the usage of the Google WiFi network deployed in Mountain View, California, and find that usage naturally falls into three classes, based almost entirely on client device type. Moreover, each of these classes of use has significant geographic locality, following the distribution of residential, commercial, and transportation areas of the city. Finally, we find a diverse set of mobility patterns that map well to the archetypal use cases for traditional access technologies.

REFERENCES

• 1: Daniel Aguayo , John Bicket , Sanjit Biswas , Glenn Judd , Robert Morris, Link-level measurements from an 802.11b mesh network, Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, August 30-September 03, 2004, Portland, Oregon, USA
• 2: M. Allman, K. Christensen, B. Nordman, and V. Paxson. Enabling an energy-efficient future internet. In Proceedings of HotNets, Nov. 2007.
• 3: Anand Balachandran , Geoffrey M. Voelker , Paramvir Bahl , P. Venkat Rangan, Characterizing user behavior and network performance in a public wireless LAN, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems, June 15-19, 2002, Marina Del Rey, California
• 4: Magdalena Balazinska , Paul Castro, Characterizing mobility and network usage in a corporate wireless local-area network, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services, p.303-316, May 05-08, 2003, San Francisco, California [doi>10.1145/1066116.1066127]
• 5: John Bicket , Daniel Aguayo , Sanjit Biswas , Robert Morris, Architecture and evaluation of an unplanned 802.11b mesh network, Proceedings of the 11th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, August 28-September 02, 2005, Cologne, Germany [doi>10.1145/1080829.1080833]
• 6: Sanjit Biswas , Robert Morris, ExOR: opportunistic multi-hop routing for wireless networks, Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, August 22-26, 2005, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• 7: Vladimir Brik , Shravan Rayanchu , Sharad Saha , Sayandeep Sen , Vivek Shrivastava , Suman Banerjee, A measurement study of a commercial-grade urban wifi mesh, Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement, October 20-22, 2008, Vouliagmeni, Greece [doi>10.1145/1452520.1452534]
• 8: J. Camp, V. Mancuso, O. Gurewitz, and E. Knightly. A measurement study of multiplicative overhead effects in wireless networks. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM, Apr. 2008.
• 9: Joseph Camp , Joshua Robinson , Christopher Steger , Edward Knightly, Measurement driven deployment of a two-tier urban mesh access network, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services, June 19-22, 2006, Uppsala, Sweden [doi>10.1145/1134680.1134691]
• 10: Yu-Chung Cheng , Mikhail Afanasyev , Patrick Verkaik , Péter Benkö , Jennifer Chiang , Alex C. Snoeren , Stefan Savage , Geoffrey M. Voelker, Automating cross-layer diagnosis of enterprise wireless networks, Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, August 27-31, 2007, Kyoto, Japan
• 11: Yu-Chung Cheng , John Bellardo , Péter Benkö , Alex C. Snoeren , Geoffrey M. Voelker , Stefan Savage, Jigsaw: solving the puzzle of enterprise 802.11 analysis, Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, September 11-15, 2006, Pisa, Italy
• 12: Tristan Henderson , David Kotz , Ilya Abyzov, The changing usage of a mature campus-wide wireless network, Proceedings of the 10th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 26-October 01, 2004, Philadelphia, PA, USA [doi>10.1145/1023720.1023739]
• 13: F. Hernández-Campos and M. Papadopouli. A Comparative Measurement Study of the Workload of Wireless Access Points in Campus Networks. In Proceedings of IEEE PIMRC, Sept. 2005.
• 14: Amit P. Jardosh , Krishna N. Ramachandran , Kevin C. Almeroth , Elizabeth M. Belding-Royer, Understanding congestion in IEEE 802.11b wireless networks, Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet Measurement, p.25-25, October 19-21, 2005, Berkeley, CA
• 15: Amit P. Jardosh , Krishna N. Ramachandran , Kevin C. Almeroth , Elizabeth M. Belding-Royer, Understanding link-layer behavior in highly congested IEEE 802.11b wireless networks, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Experimental approaches to wireless network design and analysis, August 22-22, 2005, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA [doi>10.1145/1080148.1080151]
• 16: David Kotz , Kobby Essien, Analysis of a campus-wide wireless network, Proceedings of the 8th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 23-28, 2002, Atlanta, Georgia, USA [doi>10.1145/570645.570659]
• 17: C. R. Livingston. Radius accounting. RFC 2866, IETF, June 2000.
• 18: Ratul Mahajan , Maya Rodrig , David Wetherall , John Zahorjan, Analyzing the MAC-level behavior of wireless networks in the wild, Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, September 11-15, 2006, Pisa, Italy
• 19: Marvin McNett , Geoffrey M. Voelker, Access and mobility of wireless PDA users, ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review, v.9 n.2, April 2005 [doi>10.1145/1072989.1072995]
• 20: K. N. Ramachandran, E. M. Belding-Royer, and K. C. Almeroth. DAMON: A Distributed Architecture for Monitoring Multi-hop Mobile Networks. In Proceedings of IEEE SECON, Oct. 2004.
• 21: Bhaskaran Raman , Kameswari Chebrolu, Design and evaluation of a new MAC protocol for long-distance 802.11 mesh networks, Proceedings of the 11th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, August 28-September 02, 2005, Cologne, Germany [doi>10.1145/1080829.1080847]
• 22: B. Raman and K. Chebrolu. Experiences in using WiFi for rural internet in India. IEEE Communications Magazine, Special Issue on New Directions In Networking Technologies In Emerging Economies, 45(1):104--110, Jan. 2007.
• 23: Joshua Paul Robinson , Ram Swaminathan , Edward W. Knightly, Assessment of urban-scale wireless networks with a small number of measurements, Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 14-19, 2008, San Francisco, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1409944.1409967]
• 24: Maya Rodrig , Charles Reis , Ratul Mahajan , David Wetherall , John Zahorjan, Measurement-based characterization of 802.11 in a hotspot setting, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Experimental approaches to wireless network design and analysis, August 22-22, 2005, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA [doi>10.1145/1080148.1080150]
• 25: D. Schwab and R. Bunt. Characterising the Use of a Campus Wireless Network. In Proceedings of IEEE Infocom, 2004.
• 26: Sayandeep Sen , Bhaskaran Raman, Long distance wireless mesh network planning: problem formulation and solution, Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web, May 08-12, 2007, Banff, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/1242572.1242693]
• 27: Diane Tang , Mary Baker, Analysis of a local-area wireless network, Proceedings of the 6th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, p.1-10, August 06-11, 2000, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/345910.345912]
• 28: Diane Tang , Mary Baker, Analysis of a metropolitan-area wireless network, Wireless Networks, v.8 n.2/3, p.107-120, March-May 2002 [doi>10.1023/A:1013739407600]
• 29: S. Thajchayapong and J. M. Peha. Mobility Patterns in Microcellular Wireless Networks. In Proceedings of IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking, Mar. 2003.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.3 Network Operations
          Subjects: Public networks

General Terms:
Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
google, mesh network, wifi