Marangaze Munhepe Mulhanga, Solange Rito Lima, Paulo Carvalho
Centro ALGORITMI
Universidade do Minho, Departamento de Informática
P-4710-057 Braga, Portugal
Tel.: +351 253 604432
Fax.: +351 253 604471
E-mail: solange at di.uminho.pt
The recent commitment of European Universities to join a global
wireless access and roaming infrastructure through the eduroam
initiative has brought many advantages to the academic
community. In a
new environment of increasing user mobility, it is useful to study and
understand the users' behaviour when accessing the wireless network
infrastructure. This paper is focused on characterising the real
network usage within university campuses, based on WLAN traffic traces
collected at the University of Minho (Portugal). The obtained results,
allowing to identify user trends and quantify the influence of access
location on the number of associated users, the number and duration of
sessions, the volume of generated traffic, and user mobility
indicators, provide important directions for planning future
improvements of university WLANs.