Predicting short 802.11 sessions from RADIUS usage data

The duration of 802.11 user sessions has been widely studied in the context of analyzing user behavior and mobility. Short (smaller-than-5-minutes) sessions are never used or characterized in these analyses as they are unrelated to user behavior and considered as artifacts introduced by the wireless network. In this paper we characterize short 802.11 sessions as recorded through RADIUS authentication. We show that 50% of access points have 70% of smaller than 5 minutes sessions in a 5 months trace from the Eduroam academic wireless network in the University of Porto. Exactly because they are artifacts introduced by the network, short sessions are an important indicator for network management and the quality of the wireless access. Network managers typically do not collect and process session information but rely on SNMP to provide summaries of 802.11 usage data. We develop a modeling framework to provide predictions for the number of short sessions from SNMP data. We model the data stream of each access point using two methods of regression and one classification technique. We evaluate these models based on short session prediction accuracy. The models are trained on the 5 months data and the best results show prediction accuracy of 95.27% in polynomial regression at degree of 3.