Characterizing spontaneous IEEE 802.11 network deployments

Nowadays, 802.11 networks have been deployed in a scale similar to that of Ethernet networks in the 90´s. Devices willing to connect to a single access point should discover it before attempting a connection. The discovery process has been proved to be highest delay sub-process during the initial discovery or a handover for seamless connectivity. In this article we present a detailed description of the scanning process in a Linux kernel, and analyze metrics of two different scenarios to characterize spontaneous deployments.