WIFImon NORDUnet Tech Workshop 2015
Transcript of WIFImon NORDUnet Tech Workshop 2015
WIFIMon
“How to fix WIFI take 2”Dave Wilson, James Healy, Kostas Stamos, Vasileios Kokkinos, Arne
Øslebo, Kurt Baumann, Jan Hertzberg, Brian Bach Mortensen (presenter)
Géant4 - Service Activity 3 Task 3
Problem statement
• Users complain about WIFI performance to local network admin
• Typical solutions:• Network admin checks AP logs or hardware probes (if any)• Send someone to check the installation
• Problem might be solved due to students leaving the room
• If “hard” fault –>• No Problem case solved done
• If “soft” problem à• more data is needed to determine the cause and the fix
• Furthermore, a proactive solutions was sought
Road to a fix
• Problem was raised at the Dublin City University (James Healy)
• They contacted HEAnet (Dave Wilson) thinking that they would have a good-cheap-fast fix to the problem
• Getting all 3 at the same time turned out to be problematic
• HEAnet went to Géant with the idea:• Lets crowd source the performance of the WIFI
installations
Measuring WIFI 1.
• Hardware probes are great for WIFI monitoring
• But they are typically fixed a certain locations
• Users are not!
• They measure probe performance• Users don’t care about probe performance
Measuring WIFI 2.
• Software probes can be run by user device
• They are cheap
• They are abundant (think student devices)
• They (may) represent the performance the user gets
What we need then?
• JavaScript that runs in the users browser that measures
• Bandwidth/Latency• IP Address of the user• Timestamp
What we need then (cont.)?
• DHCP/Radius logs• Mac address of user and access point• IP Address of the user• Timestamp
• This will make it possible to correlate JavaScript measurements with Access Points• Pin pointing problems to specific APs
Client Software
• Rather than implementing measurement JavaScript from bottom we took a look at open source implementations:• Nettest
(https://code.google.com/p/nettest/)• Boomerang
(https://github.com/yahoo/boomerang)• Currently using nettest
• Planning to test Boomerang
Correlation
• Currently we are using Nettest• Correlating the data from JavaScript
with Radius/DHCP • Lets see a simple check:
Basic checking
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
Download rate(KB/s)
Upload rate(KB/s)
Measuring at NT2015
• Not optimal conditions :0(• Only hotel Wi-Fi• No log files to correlate measurements
from JavaScript to AP points• Website did not implement JavaScript
on schedule page• No time to fix it before people where here
• But we did get a few measurements tru…
• 48 measurements as of last night
Bandwidth
• Clearly not all measurements are “good”
Ping
Ping
• Correlation between bad ping and bandwidth• User at edge of Wi-Fi reach?
Statistics
• Mean values• Down, Up, Ping:• 1107KB/s, 476KB/s, 47ms
• Standard deviation• 688KB/s, 194KB/s, 30ms
• Pretty big variance from the mean• So maybe not that good to use for
anomaly detection??
Statistics cont.
• So if the above is normal behavior• How do we detect issues with the Wi-Fi network?
• We probably need to get data from healthy and unhealthy scenarios• Then we can compare the stats and see if there
is big changes in mean/variance etc.• E.g. if enough pings go wrong it will eventually shift
the mean value to a higher point• And perhaps the variation will go down?
• This is of course so far PURE guesswork from my side!
Further Data Validation
• Comparing Data with HW probes is a topic that might reveal the usefulness of WIFImon (and probes)
• Will the probes and the clients see the same degradation
• Or will one “party” have an edge?• Whatever the result it might be a good
way to detect problems to correlate the varios measurements
Summary
• We got the basis for doing a more throughout validation
• We do need a lot more data to make any attempt on drawing conclusion
• If you want to participate with data collection• Do not hesitate to contact us
• We have a small agile team• Changes are made on a daily basis
• With your help we will know if worth continuing!
Thanks
• All from the WIFIMon team• Erik Kikkenborg
• Feel free to contact me or any team member with ideas, suggestions, corrections for further work
E-mail: [email protected]