Assessing the Completeness of Wireless-side Tracing Mechanisms

Analyzing traces of wireless network activity has many pragmatic purposes, from capacity planning to network design. Unfortunately, capturing complete traces of wireless traffic is difficult, and using incomplete traces can degrade the quality of the aforementioned analyses. In this paper we examine three different methods for estimating the completeness of wireless traces. We find that a method that examines MAC-layer sequence numbers provides the most accurate results. We also examine the effect of the placement of wireless sensors on the completeness of wireless-side traces. We determine that locating sensors such that the signal strengths between clients and access points is over 40% results in low miss rates at the sensor, and few CRC errors.