Wi-Fi All-Channel Analyzer

Abstract

In this paper, we present WACA, the first system to simultaneously measure the energy in all 24 Wi-Fi channels that allow channel bonding at 5 GHz with microsecond scale granularity. With WACA, we perform a first-of-its-kind measurement campaign in areas including urban hotspots, residential neighborhoods, universities, and a sold-out stadium with 98,000 fans and 12,000 simultaneous Wi-Fi connections. The gathered dataset is a unique asset to find insights otherwise not possible in the context of multi-channel technologies like Wi-Fi. To show its potential, we compare the performance of contiguous and non-contiguous channel bonding using a trace-driven framework. We show that while non-contiguous outperforms contiguous channel bonding's throughput, occasionally bigger by a factor of 5, their average throughputs are similar.