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 eduroam initiative is
assuming an ever growing relevance in providing a secure, worldwide
roaming access within the university WLAN context. Although several
studies have focused on educational WLAN traffic characterisation, the
increasing variety of devices, mobility scenarios and user
applications, motivate assessing the effective use of eduroam in order
to sustain consistent network planning and deployment. Based on recent
WLAN traffic traces collected at the University of Minho (Portugal) and
University of Vigo (Spain), the present work contributes for
identifying and characterising patterns of user behaviour regarding,
for instance, the location and activity sector of users. The results of
data analysis quantify the impact of network access location on the
number of associated users, on the number and duration of sessions
and corresponding traffic volumes. The results also illustrate to
what extent users take advantage of mobility in the WLAN. Complementing
the analysis on a monthly basis, a fine grain study of WLAN traffic is
provided through the identification of users' behaviour and patterns in
small timescales.