Scientists develop automated WiFi trouble-shooting system

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have developed an automated, enterprise scale WiFi trouble-shooting system.

Washington, Sept 5 : Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have developed an automated, enterprise scale WiFi trouble-shooting system.

"If you have a wireless problem in our building, our system automatically analyses the behaviour of your connection - each wireless protocol, each wired network service and the many interactions between them," said Stefan Savage, one of the UCSD science professors who led the development of the trouble shooting system.

"In the end, we can say 'it's because of this that your wireless is slow or has stopped working' - and we can tell you immediately," he said.

As part of their study, the team of scientists from the UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering developed a set of modelling techniques for automatically characterizing the source of networking problems in Wi-Fi systems.

In particular, the team focussed on data transfer delays unique to 802.11 networks - media access dynamics and mobility management latency.

Diagnosing problems in the now ubiquitous 802.11-based wireless access networks requires a huge amount of data, expertise and time. In addition to the myriad complexities of the wired network, wireless networks face the additional challenges of shared spectrum, user mobility and authentication management.

Finally, the interaction between wired and wireless networks itself posses many problems.

The system developed by the UCSD team tries to identify why the WiFi network connection is slow and what is responsible for making it slow.

"Today, if you ask your network administrator why it takes minutes to connect to the network or why your WiFi connection is slow, they're unlikely to know the answer. Many problems are transient - they're gone before you can even get an admin to look at them - and the number of possible reasons is huge," said Yu-Chung Cheng, a computer science Ph.D. student at UCSD and lead author on the paper.

"Few organizations have the expertise, data or tools to decompose the underlying problems and interactions responsible for transient outages or performance degradations. We've created a virtual wireless expert who is always at work," he said.

The study, "Automating Cross-Layer Diagnosis of Enterprise Wireless Networks" was presented last week in Kyoto, Japan at ACM SIGCOMM, one of the world's premier networking conferences.

ANI