CRAWDAD buffalo/phonelab-wifi

Citation Author(s):
Jinghao
Shi
University of Buffalo
Chunming
Qiao
University of Buffalo
Dimitrios
Koutsonikolas
University of Buffalo
Geoffrey
Challen
University of Buffalo
Submitted by:
CRAWDAD Team
Last updated:
Wed, 03/09/2016 - 11:15
DOI:
10.15783/C7QS37
Data Format:
License:
0
0 ratings - Please login to submit your rating.

Abstract 

Smartphones perform Wifi scans to adapt to the changing wireless environments causes by mobility. From network monitoring perspective, such scans provide a natural stream of network measurements from client's point of view. In order to see whether such measurements can provide new insights in monitoring large scale wireless networks, we collected the Wifi scan results data, together with other Wifi related logs, from the PhoneLab smartphone testbed over 5 months. All data are collected passively from the smartphones.

last modified: 2016-03-09

nickname: phonelab-wifi

institution: University at Buffalo

reason for most recent change: the initial version

release date: 2016-03-09

date/time of measurement start: 2014-11-07

date/time of measurement end: 2015-04-03

websitewww.crawdad.org/buffalo/phonelab-wifi

network type: 802.11 infrastructure

collection environment: PhoneLab is a large scale smartphone testbed at University at Buffalo (UB). Participants carry instrumented Nexus 5 smartphones as their primary device. We instrument the PhoneLab platform to collected Wifi related events. During the course of our experiment, Wifi data of 284 devices were reported.

network configuration: The dataset contains the Wifi scan results reported by each smartphones. Given that PhoneLab participants are primarily UB faculty, staff and students, we expect most of the Wifi networks reported to be UB campus Wifi network or each participants' home Wifi network.

data collection methodology: Android system sends broadcasts when certain events happen, such as Wifi scan results available, Wifi connection status changed, etc. We passively log such events when they occur.

sanitization: All identifiers that appear in our dataset, including the device ID, AP SSID and BSSID, have been hashed. These identifiers are hashed consistently throughout the dataset, so the same identifier can be found in each traceset. We also provide unhashed OUIs to allow analysis of particular manufacturers' devices.

limitation: Since we only passively listen for the Wifi scan result events, the temporal resolution solely depend on the internal scan frequency of Android system.

Four types of events are monitored:

  • WifiScanResult: Wifi scan results available
  • WifiConnectedState: Wifi connection status
  • WifiEnabledState: Wifi is toggled on/off.
  • WifiRSSIChange: RSSI update when the smartphone is connected to Wifi.

The directory structure is <event>/<device>/yyyy-mm-dd.json.gz.

In each data file, each line is a JSON string. The fields are explained in each event's description.

Traces

the buffalo/phonelab-wifi/wifi/WifiScanResult trace

file name: WifiScanResult.tgz

size: 3.4GB

type: tgz

md5: bd87384123d3c419abbbb79ab3441e37

last modified: 2016-03-09

nickname: WifiScanResult

short description: Wifi scan results.

description: Results of Wifi scan. One scan may return multiple entries. each corresponding to one Access Point (AP).

reason for most recent change: the initial version

release date: 2016-03-09

date/time of measurement start: 2014-11-07

date/time of measurement end: 2015-04-03

format of trace data

Fields are:

  • timestamp: seconds since UTC epoch.
  • SSID
  • BSSID
  • BSSID_OUI
  • frequency: AP channel in MHz.
  • level: RSSI
  • capabilities
  • tsf: time synchronization function

Note that one scan may return multiple scan results, which span multiple lines in the dataset. Users should use the "timestamp" filed to group the scan results reported in one scan together.

the buffalo/phonelab-wifi/wifi/WifiConnectedState trace

file name: WifiConnectedState.tgz

size: 21MB

type: tgz

md5: e270348dc5bcbcdd9e2b6105f5949e64

last modified: 2016-03-09

nickname: WifiConnectedState

short description: Wifi connection status.

description: Wifi connection status changes.

reason for most recent change: the initial version

release date: 2016-03-09

date/time of measurement start: 2014-11-07

date/time of measurement end: 2015-04-03

format of trace data

Fields are:

  • timestamp: seconds since UTC epoch.
  • connected
  • SSID
  • BSSID
  • BSSID_OUI

Note that the SSID, BSSID and BSSID_OUI filed only exist if "connected" is true.

the buffalo/phonelab-wifi/wifi/WifiEnabledState trace

file name: WifiEnabledState.tgz

size: 1.2MB

type: tgz

md5: 3820aeb3597bee19835e9eeebb985461

last modified: 2016-03-09

nickname: WifiEnabledState

short description: Wifi enabled/disabled status.

description: Wifi enabled status changes. This event is triggered when user toggle the Wifi enabled status.

reason for most recent change: the initial version

release date: 2016-03-09

date/time of measurement start: 2014-11-07

date/time of measurement end: 2015-04-03

format of trace data

Fields are:

  • timestamp: seconds since UTC epoch.
  • enabled

the buffalo/phonelab-wifi/wifi/WifiRSSIChange trace

file name: WifiRSSIChange.tgz

size: 104MB

type: tgz

md5: a73b631a734e66eb42a3e918fe4d37a5

last modified: 2016-03-09

nickname: WifiRSSIChange

short description: RSSI update of current Wifi link.

description: Wifi link RSSI changes. This event is only reported when Wifi is connected.

reason for most recent change: the initial version

release date: 2016-03-09

date/time of measurement start: 2014-11-07

date/time of measurement end: 2015-04-03

format of trace data

Fields are:

  • timestamp: seconds since UTC epoch.
  • SSID
  • BSSID
  • BSSID_OUI
  • RSSI
  • LinkSpeed (in Mbps)
  • HiddenSSID
  • MeteredHint

Dataset Files

LOGIN TO ACCESS DATASET FILES
Open Access dataset files are accessible to all logged in  users. Don't have a login?  Create a free IEEE account.  IEEE Membership is not required.

Documentation

AttachmentSize
File buffalo-phonelab-wifi-readme.txt1.62 KB

These datasets are part of Community Resource for Archiving Wireless Data (CRAWDAD). CRAWDAD began in 2004 at Dartmouth College as a place to share wireless network data with the research community. Its purpose was to enable access to data from real networks and real mobile users at a time when collecting such data was challenging and expensive. The archive has continued to grow since its inception, and starting in summer 2022 is being housed on IEEE DataPort.

Questions about CRAWDAD? See our CRAWDAD FAQ. Interested in submitting your dataset to the CRAWDAD collection? Get started, by submitting an Open Access Dataset.