Hybrid approach to distributed Wi-Fi performance assessment for multi-floor structures

This paper proposes the enhancement of Wi-Fi quality assessment with a hybrid approach, which uses small and low-cost devices like Raspberry Pi, and mobile devices like smart-phones. Existing solutions for Wi-Fi quality assessment are expensive, and guarantee for continuous monitoring is not given. A monitoring device like a spectrum analyzer, needs the user to follow a specified path to cover entire geographical Wi-Fi coverage, for each Wi-Fi quality assessment procedure with the limited number of such monitoring devices. This paper introduces several engineering approaches, including mixture of Raspberry Pi and mobile phones as sensing devices. Taking the advantage of low cost Raspberry Pis and readily available mobile devices, we collect real-world multi-floored building data for Wi-Fi performance information from user's perspective and visualize it as a geographical Wi-Fi signal strength heat map, as well as a geographical end-user network experience. We analyze the result of field trials to understand how small, low-cost devices may contribute as an alternative and efficient solution of Wi-Fi quality assessment.