Devices implementing newer wireless standards continue to displace older wireless technology. As 802.11ac access points (APs) are rapidly adopted in enterprise environments, new challenges arise. This paper first presents an overview of trends in enterprise wireless networks based on a large-scale measurement study, in which we collect data from an anonymous subset of millions of radio access points in hundreds of thousands of real-world deployments. Based on the observed data and our experience deploying wireless networks at scale, we then propose two techniques that we have implemented in Meraki APs to improve both overall network capacity and performance perceived by end users: (i) a dynamic channel assignment algorithm, TurboCA, that adjusts to frequent RF condition changes, and (ii) a novel approach, FastACK, that improves the end-to-end performance of TCP traversing high-throughput wireless links. Finally, we evaluate TurboCA with metrics taken from a variety of real-world networks and evaluate TCP performance of FastACK with extensive testbed experiments.

Meraki is a cloud-based network management system which provides centralized configuration, monitoring, and network troubleshooting tools across hundreds of thousands of sites worldwide. As part of its architecture, the Meraki system has built a database of time-series measurements of wireless link, client, and application behavior for monitoring and debugging purposes. This paper studies an anonymized subset of measurements, containing data from approximately ten thousand radio access points, tens of thousands of links, and 5.6 million clients from one-week periods in January 2014 and January 2015 to provide a deeper understanding of real-world network behavior. This paper observes the following phenomena: wireless network usage continues to grow quickly, driven most by growth in the number of devices connecting to each network. Intermediate link delivery rates are common indoors across a wide range of deployment environments. Typical access points share spectrum with dozens of nearby networks, but the presence of a network on a channel does not predict channel utilization. Most access points see 2.4 GHz channel utilization of 20% or more, with the top decile seeing greater than 50%, and the majority of the channel use contains decodable 802.11 headers.