RFDump: an architecture for monitoring the wireless ether

  • Authors:

  • Kaushik Lakshminarayanan;Samir Sapra;Srinivasan Seshan;Peter Steenkiste

  • Affiliations:

  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Networking researchers have been using tools like wireshark and tcpdump to sniff packets on physical links that use different types of datalink protocols, e.g. Ethernet or 802.11, allowing them to monitor higher level protocols sharing these links. However, monitoring wireless links is more challenging, since the transmission medium is shared by flows using diverse datalink protocols (e.g. 802.11, Bluetooth) and physical layer schemes (e.g. QPSK and GFSK). To this end, we propose RFDump, a software architecture for monitoring packets on heterogeneous wireless networks. The key idea underlying our architecture is the use of a fast detection stage which can tentatively map signals to protocols very efficiently. As a result, RFDump can scale up to a modest number (5-10) of wireless technologies. We implemented RFDump on the GNU Radio and USRP platforms. This is, to our knowledge, the first inexpensive software-based infrastructure for simultaneously analyzing multiple wireless protocols in real-time. Using traces from the real world and from a wireless emulator testbed, we show that our implementation is efficient and accurate. Further, we demonstrate that our system is extensible and scales with the addition of new protocols.