Usage Patterns in an Urban WiFi Network
Venue
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 18 , Issue: 5 (2010), 1359 - 1372
Publication Year
2010
Authors
Mikhail Afanasyev, Tsuwei Chen
BibTeX
Abstract
While WiFi was initially designed as a local-area access network, mesh networking
technologies have led to increasingly expansive deployments of WiFi networks. In
urban environments, the WiFi mesh frequently supplements a number of existing
access technologies, including wired broadband networks, 3G cellular, and
commercial WiFi hotspots. It is an open question what role citywide WiFi
deployments play in the increasingly diverse access network spectrum. We study the
usage of the Google WiFi network deployed in Mountain View, CA, and find that usage
naturally falls into three classes based almost entirely on client device type,
which we divide into traditional laptop users, fixed-location access devices, and
PDA-like smartphone devices. Moreover, each of these classes of use has significant
geographic locality, following the distribution of residential, commercial, and
transportation areas of the city. When comparing the network usage of each device
class, we find a diverse set of mobility patterns that map well to the archetypal
use cases for traditional access technologies. To help place our results in
context, we also provide key performance measurements of the mesh backbone and,
where possible, compare them to those of previously studied urban mesh networks.
