Measurement and analysis of real-world 802.11 mesh networks
Despite many years of work in wireless mesh networks built using 802.11 radios, the performance and behavior of these networks in the wild is not well-understood. This lack of understanding is due in part to the lack of access to data from a wide range of these networks; most researchers have access...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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Association for Computing Machinery
2011
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/62820 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6732-6799 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1455-9652 |
| _version_ | 1826213514840113152 |
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| author | LaCurts, Katrina Leigh Balakrishnan, Hari |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory LaCurts, Katrina Leigh Balakrishnan, Hari |
| author_sort | LaCurts, Katrina Leigh |
| collection | MIT |
| description | Despite many years of work in wireless mesh networks built using 802.11 radios, the performance and behavior of these networks in the wild is not well-understood. This lack of understanding is due in part to the lack of access to data from a wide range of these networks; most researchers have access to only one or two testbeds at any time. In recent years, however, 802.11 mesh networks networks have been deployed commercially and have real users who use the networks in a wide range of conditions. This paper analyzes data collected from 1407 access points in 110 different commercially deployed Meraki wireless mesh networks, constituting perhaps the largest study of real-world 802.11 networks to date. After analyzing a 24-hour snapshot of data collected from these networks, we answer questions from a variety of active research topics, such as the accuracy of SNR-based bit rate adaptation, the impact of opportunistic routing, and the prevalence of hidden terminals. The size and diversity of our data set allows us to analyze claims previously only made in small-scale studies. In particular, we find that the SNR of a link is a good indicator of the optimal bit rate for that link, but that one could not make an SNR-to-bit rate look-up table that was accurate for an entire network. We also find that an ideal opportunistic routing protocol provides little to no benefit on most paths, and that "hidden triples"---network topologies that can lead to hidden terminals--are more common than suggested in previous work, and increase in proportion as the bit rate increases. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T15:50:44Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/62820 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | en_US |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T15:50:44Z |
| publishDate | 2011 |
| publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/628202022-10-02T04:30:05Z Measurement and analysis of real-world 802.11 mesh networks LaCurts, Katrina Leigh Balakrishnan, Hari Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Balakrishnan, Hari LaCurts, Katrina Leigh Balakrishnan, Hari Despite many years of work in wireless mesh networks built using 802.11 radios, the performance and behavior of these networks in the wild is not well-understood. This lack of understanding is due in part to the lack of access to data from a wide range of these networks; most researchers have access to only one or two testbeds at any time. In recent years, however, 802.11 mesh networks networks have been deployed commercially and have real users who use the networks in a wide range of conditions. This paper analyzes data collected from 1407 access points in 110 different commercially deployed Meraki wireless mesh networks, constituting perhaps the largest study of real-world 802.11 networks to date. After analyzing a 24-hour snapshot of data collected from these networks, we answer questions from a variety of active research topics, such as the accuracy of SNR-based bit rate adaptation, the impact of opportunistic routing, and the prevalence of hidden terminals. The size and diversity of our data set allows us to analyze claims previously only made in small-scale studies. In particular, we find that the SNR of a link is a good indicator of the optimal bit rate for that link, but that one could not make an SNR-to-bit rate look-up table that was accurate for an entire network. We also find that an ideal opportunistic routing protocol provides little to no benefit on most paths, and that "hidden triples"---network topologies that can lead to hidden terminals--are more common than suggested in previous work, and increase in proportion as the bit rate increases. National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CNS-0721702) Foxconn 2011-05-13T21:32:59Z 2011-05-13T21:32:59Z 2010-11 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/ConferencePaper 978-1-4503-0483-2 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/62820 LaCurts, Katrina, and Hari Balakrishnan. “Measurement and Analysis of Real-world 802.11 Mesh Networks.” Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference on Internet Measurement. Melbourne, Australia: ACM, 2010. 123-136. Copyright © 2010, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6732-6799 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1455-9652 en_US http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1879141.1879158 ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference. Proceedings 2010 Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ application/pdf Association for Computing Machinery MIT web domain |
| spellingShingle | LaCurts, Katrina Leigh Balakrishnan, Hari Measurement and analysis of real-world 802.11 mesh networks |
| title | Measurement and analysis of real-world 802.11 mesh networks |
| title_full | Measurement and analysis of real-world 802.11 mesh networks |
| title_fullStr | Measurement and analysis of real-world 802.11 mesh networks |
| title_full_unstemmed | Measurement and analysis of real-world 802.11 mesh networks |
| title_short | Measurement and analysis of real-world 802.11 mesh networks |
| title_sort | measurement and analysis of real world 802 11 mesh networks |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/62820 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6732-6799 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1455-9652 |
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