WiFi clients and access points (APs) in large-scale and dense WiFi networks transmit millions of MAC layer frames at a granularity of microseconds. Thus, resulting in performance problems due to complex MAC layer interactions that may not be useful. Literature suggests existence of three such problems-(1) Useless and Aggressive Active Scanning (AAS), (2) Interrupted Mobility, and (3) Degraded quality of streaming voice and video services. We analyse 6 months worth of WiFi traffic captured from WiFi network deployed at the academic building of IIIT-Delhi to (1) detect and quantify the effect of AAS - WiFi clients loose upto 10X of throughput, (2) detect the 7 causes of AAS, and (3) suggest 2 ways to control AAS. We propose to develop a system that operates on global view of WiFi network through live measurements. This system will incorporate the mechanisms to detect and mitigate the causes of above mentioned problems.
['Dheryta Jaisinghani', 'Vinayak S. Naik', 'Sanjit Krishnan Kaul']
POSTER: Mechanisms for Detecting and Mitigating Performance Drop in Large Scale WiFi Networks