Understanding the trends in the use of wireless local area networks (WLANs) (i.e., how much, when and where traffic is present) is an important issue for modeling the network and for optimizing the allocated resources. Interesting results can be extracted by analyzing traces from real scenarios. In previous works, the authors studied three buildings belonging to two campuses in Barcelona (Spain) and its surroundings. Similar common trends were observed in the three buildings, despite the different amount of users, purpose of the building, geographical location and size of the campus. In this work, the fidelity of the users in accessing the WLAN in different days is analyzed in depth. The population accessing the networks is mostly composed of infrequent users: less than half of the devices access the WLAN more than four days during the studied period. Special insight is given to the underlying distribution. It is shown that, in contrast to previous studies in the same environment, the distribution of the frequency of reconnections to the WLAN is not uniform. The main difference among different buildings is the fidelity of users: users on a small campus are more likely to reappear on different days than on a large campus, where the population is more heterogeneous. The results of this analysis provide general tools for characterizing campus-wide WLAN and a better understanding of usage and performance issues in a mature wireless network in Europe.

Peer Reviewed