MonFi: A Tool for High-Rate, Efficient, and Programmable Monitoring of WiFi Devices

The 802.11 standard, known as WiFi, is currently being used for a wide variety of applications. The increasing number of WiFi devices, their stringent communication requirements, and the need for higher energy-efficiency mandate the adoption of novel methods that rely on monitoring the WiFi communication stack to analyze, enhance communication efficiency, and secure these networks. In this paper, we propose MonFi, a publicly-available, open-source tool for high-rate, efficient, and programmable monitoring of the WiFi communication stack. With this tool, regular user-space applications can specify their required measurement parameters, monitoring rate, and measurement collection method as event-based, polling-based, or a hybrid of both. We also propose methods to ensure deterministic sampling rate regardless of the processor load caused by other processes including packet switching. In terms of sampling rate and processing efficiency, we show that MonFi outperforms the Linux tools used to monitor the communication stack.