Can user-level probing detect and diagnose common home-WLAN pathologies

  • Authors:
  • Partha Kanuparthy;Constantine Dovrolis;Konstantina Papagiannaki;Srinivasan Seshan;Peter Steenkiste

  • Affiliations:
  • Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;Telefonica Research, Barcelona, Spain;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Common Wireless LAN (WLAN) pathologies include low signal-to-noise ratio, congestion, hidden terminals or interference from non-802.11 devices and phenomena. Prior work has focused on the detection and diagnosis of such problems using layer-2 information from 802.11 devices and special purpose access points and monitors, which may not be generally available. Here, we investigate a user-level approach: is it possible to detect and diagnose 802.11 pathologies with strictly user-level active probing, without any cooperation from, and without any visibility in, layer-2 devices? In this paper, we present preliminary but promising results indicating that such diagnostics are feasible.