Modeling client arrivals at access points in wireless campus-wide networks

Abstract

Our goal is to model the arrival of wireless clients at the access points (APs) in a production 802.11 infrastructure. Such models are critical for benchmarks, simulation studies, design of capacity planning and resource allocation, and the administration and support of wireless infrastructures. Our contributions include a novel methodology for modeling the arrival processes of clients at APs and the use of a powerful visualization tool for finding detailed interior features and quantile plots with simulation envelope for goodness-of-fit test. Time-varying Poisson processes can model well the arrival processes of clients at APs. We validate these results by modeling the visit arrivals at different time intervals and APs. Furthermore, we propose a clustering of the APs based on their visit arrival and functionality of the area in which these APs are located.