Continuous monitoring of wide-area wireless networks
Justin Ormont, Jordan Walker, Suman Banerjee · ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review · 2008
In this work, we present an infrastructure for monitoring and visualizing performance of a wide-area wireless network, We present a unique, vehicle-mounted platform and a testbed for wide-area wireless experimentation. The testbed nodes are mounted on metro transit city buses in Madison, WI, and are currently equipped with both cellular EV-DO* and WiFi interfaces. Our initial goal for this infrastructure is to continuously monitor characteristics and performance of large-scale wireless networks, e.g., city-wide mesh networks or cellular networks. In such networks, customers experience a very large range of geographic and mobility-related radio environments. A vehicle-mounted platform, with fairly deterministic mobility patterns, can provide an efficient, low-cost, and robust method to gather much needed performance data on parameters like RF coverage, available bandwidth, and impact of mobility. Our demonstration outlines the framework of such a distributed measurement system. We also showcase the potential benefits by presenting our initial measurements from this testbed through the use of intuitive visualization interface.