WiFiMon - Wireless Crowdsourced Performance Monitoring and Verification
Why do Institutions need WiFiMon?
WiFi access (and in particular eduroam access) is now accepted as an essential part of the wider campus experience. Not being able to connect to network resources can damage user experiences and can result in users having to use mobile 4G data connections rather than WiFi.
Most WiFi monitoring services merely provide information on the Availability (an "Up" or "Down" status) of WiFi and can't measure the actual performance of the service. A poorly performing WiFi service affects user experiences and can also be a trigger for IT to investigate wider performance issues. But how can performance monitoring work in a situation where users are by definition mobile?
Within eduroam facilities the situation can be even more complicated as users can have multiple eduroam access points within range - making reporting of problems harder. Dedicated probes are normally in fixed locations and so, within a campus environment, can be prohibitively expensive.
For this reason GÉANT have developed WiFiMon - a crowd-sourced, distributed performance monitoring and measurement service.
What is WiFiMon?
WiFiMon is a WiFi network monitoring and performance verification system. It is capable of detecting performance issues, to visualise the workload of the network, and to provide 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 data from the WiFi physical layer in order to gather a comprehensive set of WiFi network performance metrics.
WiFiMon uses a crowdsourced approach through JavaScript code that is installed on destination sites commonly visited by users (for example a college email website or intranet) providing a performance measurement when students access the website. This light touch approach requires no client software or applications and while significantly increasing the number of measurement points across the campus.