Characterizing User Behavior in a European Academic WiFi Network

Wireless local area networks WLANs are commonplace in many universities. Understanding the trends in the usage of these networks is becoming more important. Interesting results can be extracted about association patterns by analyzing WLAN traces from real scenarios. In this work, the library in the main campus of the Technical University of Catalonia UPC in Barcelona has been studied. Daily and weekly patterns of the WLAN connections are shown. The population accessing the network is mostly composed of infrequent users: half of the population accesses the WLAN once during each month. Many users associate to only one of the twelve possible access points, which means that, despite the widespread use of lightweight devices, many users are static. 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.