Wi-Fi Spectrum Usage Analytics in University of Nevada, Reno

WiFi Access Points (APs) deployed publicly are facing serious demands due to the proliferation in WiFi enabled devices. This becomes more prominent when the user crowd moves dynamically in space creating a sporadic usage pattern like in universities, conference halls, disaster scenarios and so on. In such situation, there arises need for the efficient usage of WiFi channels so as to avoid the signal interference among devices and maintain the Quality of Service. It becomes essential to find a mechanism that caters for the dynamically changing demands by identifying areas with high spectrum usage and thus providing better WiFi coverage. The concept of floating access points play a key role in this domain whereby Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) acting as APs can move around to cover the hot zones and solve the problem of network congestion in those zones. Floating AP is one of the numerous applications that UAVs can offer and it addresses a very important issue of load balancing among the access points. As much as this concept is novel and appealing, it is of prime importance to analyze the feasibility of its deployment and operation which is what we are trying to achieve through this paper. Before launching these mobile APs, we aim to understand the dynamic spectrum usage over space, time and channels. The temporal and spatial analysis helps us to identify places that are highly congested at any given time. The channel usage pattern determines channels that are over utilized and under utilized in the congested areas. The sudden spike in the network usage also lets us detect any malicious activities going around and thus preventing the risk of getting attacked. Our goal is to use this information to deploy the floating APs during appropriate times into the congested locations and dynamically reconfigure the deployed floating APs so as to evenly distribute load across all available WiFi channels.