What is WiFiMon?

WiFiMon is a WiFi network monitoring and performance verification system. It is capable to detect performance issues, to visualize workload of the network, and to provide the technical information about the WiFi network (e.g. signal strength, link quality, bit rate, etc.). WiFiMon leverages on well-known performance verification tools (e.g. Akamai Boomerang, Speedtest) and in addition uses the data from the WiFi physical layer in order to gather the most comprehensive set of WiFi network performance metrics. 

WiFiMon can operate in two different modes which can be used either separately or together:

1. WiFiMon crowdsourced performance measurements, where measurements are gathered from users' mobile devices (phones, laptops, tablets, etc) while they use the network. This approach does not require any additional software to be installed on the mobile devices. Measurements are recorded while the end users use the network and impose the minimal additional network overhead. Crowdsourced measurements capture the subjective perception of the WiFi network quality of service and responsiveness.

2. Fixed WiFiMon measurements using deterministic, hardware probe based performance measurements, where measurements are gathered from the dedicated small form factor hardware devices (currently Raspberry Pi’s). Fixed WiFiMon measurements capture the objective measures of WiFi network quality (signal strength, link quality, bit rate etc.).

 WiFiMon is:

• Technology agnostic: WiFiMon can be deployed on any IEEE802.1x enabled WiFi networks including eduroam as it monitors the performance on the network layer. 

• Crowd aware: WiFiMon shows the end-user (mobile client) behavior on a network, its perception about the responsiveness of the network and the speed of web resources download, correlation of the performance data with end-user data, and data analysis with an effective query builder. 

• Ease to deploy: WiFiMon is a software image (also available as an Docker-Image) and can be easily deployed on an NREN/University network on hardware or software probes.

• Low-Invasive: WiFiMon active measurements are not significantly invasive and do not use too much of the available bandwidth. One WiFiMon measurement is comparable to one average web-page download (load speed).