Characterising University WLANs within Eduroam Context

Abstract

The eduroam initiative is assuming an ever growing relevance in providing a secure, worldwide roaming access within the university WLAN context. Although several studies have focused on educational WLAN traffic characterisation, the increasing variety of devices, mobility scenarios and user applications, motivate assessing the effective use of eduroam in order to sustain consistent network planning and deployment. Based on recent WLAN traffic traces collected at the University of Minho (Portugal) and University of Vigo (Spain), the present work contributes for identifying and characterising patterns of user behaviour regarding, for instance, the location and activity sector of users. The results of data analysis quantify the impact of network access location on the number of associated users, on the number and duration of sessions and corresponding traffic volumes. The results also illustrate to what extent users take advantage of mobility in the WLAN. Complementing the analysis on a monthly basis, a fine grain study of WLAN traffic is provided through the identification of users' behaviour and patterns in small timescales.