Characterizing the duration and association patterns of wireless access in a campus

Abstract:
Our goal is to characterize the access patterns in a IEEE802.11 infrastructure. This can be beneficial in many domains, including coverage planning, resource reservation, supporting location-dependent applications and applications with real-time constraints, and producing models for simulations. We conducted an extensive measurement study of wireless users and their association patterns on a major university campus using the IEEE802.11 wireless infrastructure. We characterized and analyzed the wireless access pattern based on several parameters such as mobility, session and visit durations. We show that the mobility and building type affect the session and visit durations. As the mobility increases, the visit duration tends to decrease stochastically. The opposite happens in the case of the session duration. Moreover, there exist different stochastic orders among visit durations of different building types when conditioning on session mobility. A family of BiPareto distributions can model the visit and session duration.