Can User-Level Probing Detect and Diagnose Common Home-WLAN Pathologies?

TL;DR

This paper explores whether user-level active probing can detect and diagnose common home WLAN issues without relying on layer-2 device information, offering a potentially more accessible diagnostic approach.

Contribution

It demonstrates the feasibility of diagnosing WLAN pathologies using only user-level active probing, without special hardware or layer-2 visibility.

Findings

Preliminary results show promising detection capabilities.

User-level probing can identify common WLAN issues.

Approach does not require cooperation from network devices.

Abstract

Common WLAN pathologies include low signal-to-noise ratio, congestion, hidden terminals or interference from non-802.11 devices and phenomena. Prior work has focused on the detection and diagnosis of such problems using layer-2 information from 802.11 devices and special-purpose access points and monitors, which may not be generally available. Here, we investigate a userlevel approach: is it possible to detect and diagnose 802.11 pathologies with strictly user-level active probing, without any cooperation from, and without any visibility in, layer-2 devices? In this paper, we present preliminary but promising results indicating that such diagnostics are feasible.