WiPal: Efficient Offline Merging of IEEE 802.11 Traces

TL;DR

WiPal is a fast, easy-to-use offline tool for merging IEEE 802.11 wireless traces without requiring specialized infrastructure or software, significantly improving efficiency over existing solutions.

Contribution

We introduce WiPal, a novel offline merging tool for IEEE 802.11 traces that is flexible, modular, and more efficient than existing tools, facilitating research in wireless measurement studies.

Findings

WiPal is an order of magnitude faster than comparable tools.

WiPal does not require wired infrastructure or specialized services.

WiPal is straightforward for the research community to adopt.

Abstract

Merging wireless traces is a fundamental step in measurement-based studies involving multiple packet sniffers. Existing merging tools either require a wired infrastructure or are limited in their usability. We propose WiPal, an offline merging tool for IEEE 802.11 traces that has been designed to be efficient and simple to use. WiPal is flexible in the sense that it does not require any specific services, neither from monitors (like synchronization, access to a wired network, or embedding specific software) nor from its software environment (e.g. an SQL server). We present WiPal's operation and show how its features - notably, its modular design - improve both ease of use and efficiency. Experiments on real traces show that WiPal is an order of magnitude faster than other tools providing the same features. To our knowledge, WiPal is the only offline trace merger that can be used by the research community in a straightforward fashion.