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Instrumentation for measuring users’ goodputs in dense Wi-Fi deployments and capacity-planning rules

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Abstract

Before a dense Wi-Fi network is deployed, Wi-Fi providers must be careful with the performance promises they made in their way to win a bidding process. After such deployment takes place, Wi-Fi-network owners—such as public institutions—must verify that the QoS agreements are being fulfilled. We have merged both needs into a low-cost measurement system, a report of measurements at diverse scenarios and a performance prediction tool. The measurement system allows measuring the actual goodput that a set of users are receiving, and it has been used in a number of schools on a national scale. From this experience, we report measurements for different scenarios and diverse factors—which may result of interest to practitioners by themselves. Finally, we translate all the learned lessons to a freely-available capacity-planning tool for forecasting performance given a set of input parameters such as frequency, signal strength and number of users—and so, useful for estimating the cost of future deployments.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Regional Development Fund under the project TRÁFICA (MINECO/FEDER TEC2015-69417-C2-1-R) and by Naudit High Performance Computing and Networking under the project ESCUELAS CONECTADAS (Convenios 2018 y 2019 “Análisis de tráfico y supercomputación de sobremesa”, art. 83).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. High Performance Computing and Networking Research Group, Escuela Politécnica Superior, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    José Luis García-Dorado, Javier Ramos, Francisco J. Gomez-Arribas & Javier Aracil

  2. Naudit High Performance Computing and Networking, Madrid, Pamplona, Spain

    Francisco J. Gomez-Arribas, Eduardo Magaña & Javier Aracil

  3. Telecommunications, Networks and Services Research Group, Universidad Pública de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain

    Eduardo Magaña

Authors
  1. José Luis García-Dorado
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  2. Javier Ramos
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  3. Francisco J. Gomez-Arribas
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  4. Eduardo Magaña
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  5. Javier Aracil
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Correspondence to José Luis García-Dorado.

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García-Dorado, J.L., Ramos, J., Gomez-Arribas, F.J. et al. Instrumentation for measuring users’ goodputs in dense Wi-Fi deployments and capacity-planning rules. Wireless Netw 26, 2943–2955 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-019-02229-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-019-02229-7

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