Characterizing the mobility and association patterns of wireless users in a campus

Our goal is to characterize the mobility and access patterns in a IEEE802.11 infrastructure. This can be beneficial in many domains, including coverage planning, resource reservation, supporting location-dependent applications and applications with real-time constraints, and produce models for simulations. We conducted an extensive measurement study of wireless users and their association patterns on a major university campus using the IEEE802.11 wireless infrastructure. We propose a new methodology to characterize and analyze the wireless access pattern based on several parameters such as mobility, session and visit durations. This methodology can allow us to study how user association and mobility patterns evolve in the temporal and spatial dimension. We show that the mobility and building type affect the session and visit durations. As the mobility increases, the visit duration tends to decrease stochastically. The opposite happens in the case of the session duration. Moreover, there exist different stochastic orders among visit durations of different building types when conditioning on session mobility.