Multichannel-Sniffing-System for Real-World Analysing of Wi-Fi-Packets

Wireless technologies like Wi-Fi send their data using multiple channels. To analyze an environment and all Wi-Fi packets inside, a sniffing system is needed, which can sniff on all used channels of the wireless technology at the same time. This allows catching most packets on each channel. In this paper, a way to build up a multi-channel-sniffing-system (MCSS) is described. The test system uses several single board computers (SBC) with an external Wi-Fi adapter (USB), 19 SBCs are sniffing nodes (SFN) and one SBC as sending node (SN). The sniffing SBCs are placed in a cycle around the sender so that every node has the same chance to receive the simulated packets from the SN. For the control of all 20 SBCs, a self-developed software is used, which connects from the host to the clients and is used for configuring the experiments. The configuration is sent to each client and will initiate their start, so that their times are also synchronized, for this all clients are synchronised using a time server.