Wireless Background Noise in the Wi-Fi Spectrum

Background noise constitutes an often-neglected factor in the investigation of solutions for wireless networks. Experiments carried out in these networks tend to ignore the presence of background noise and primitive noise simulators are used to create environments that resemble real-world characteristics. While such assumptions and experimental setups create perfect world scenarios that allow a normalized evaluation of solutions, they fail to capture transmission characteristics as they are experienced in the real world. This paper concentrates on the investigation of background noise in wireless networks, presenting a large amount of data determining a diversity of wireless noise levels that are collected over a twenty-four hour period on a busy university campus, and highlighting the importance of accounting wireless noise when experimenting in the Wi-Fi spectrum.