Comprehensive Visualization of Physical and MAC Layer Data for Wireless Network Monitoring

Wireless network monitoring is a crucial tool for network administrators to manage wireless link quality in the indoor environments such as warehouses and factories. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive visualization system for correlative analysis between physical and MAC layer activities. In order to support various types of assessment tasks by the network administrators, the system provides a mode that performs quasi-realtime visualization of the ongoing traffic, and a mode that enables detailed assessment of the link quality for the past traffic by visualizing the data over an arbitrary time scale. We implemented the visualization system using ordinary PCs combined with the sensor node that calculates signal strengths from the observed radio signals and extracts the header information conforming to the IEEE 802.11 standards. We confirmed that the system has enough performance to visualize a large amount of data within a small latency and to achieve smooth operation while the time scale is changing.