Unveiling Wi-Fi Usage Profiles: A First Look at a K-12 Education Service Provider

This paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first study with real-world traffic data from a national K-12 Education Service Provider (ESP). This ESP, which supports a one-to-one computing program in Uruguay, is in charge of the Wi-Fi Internet access at all K-12 schools in the country. Network users include teachers and students between 6 and 18 years old. This work is focused on identifying the typical network usage patterns, and studying their evolution throughout the year, in order to shed light on the user behavior in such a novel scenario. Based on specifically designed features and proper distance measures, four main Wi-Fi usage profiles are identified. These clusters are found to be stable throughout the year, which makes it possible to implement a Wi-Fi activity monitoring system trained with data collected during the first weeks of the year only. The results suggest that network traffic analysis is an essential tool for evidence-based decision making by the ESP, not only from the network operator perspective, but also providing vital information for learning analytics purposes.