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.

This paper evaluates the ability of a wireless mesh archi-tecture to provide high performance Internet access while demanding little deployment planning or operational man-agement. The architecture considered in this paper has un-planned node placement (rather than planned topology), omni-directional antennas (rather than directional links), and multi-hop routing (rather than single-hop base stations). These design decisions contribute to ease of deployment, an important requirement for community wireless networks. However, this architecture carries the risk that lack of plan-ning might render the network's performance unusably low. For example, it might be necessary to place nodes carefully to ensure connectivity; the omni-directional antennas might provide uselessly short radio ranges; or the ine±ciency of multi-hop forwarding might leave some users e®ectively dis-connected. The paper evaluates this unplanned mesh architecture with a case study of the Roofnet 802.11b mesh network. Roofnet consists of 37 nodes spread over four square kilo-meters of an urban area. The network provides users with usable performance despite lack of planning: the average inter-node throughput is 627 kbits/second, even though the average route has three hops. The paper evaluates multiple aspects of the architecture: the e®ect of node density on connectivity and throughput; the characteristics of the links that the routing protocol elects to use; the usefulness of the highly connected mesh a®orded by omni-directional antennas for robustness and throughput; and the potential performance of a single-hop network using the same nodes as Roofnet.

This paper analyzes the causes of packet loss in a 38-node urban multi-hop 802.11b network. The patterns and causes of loss are important in the design of routing and error-correction protocols, as well as in network planning.The paper makes the following observations. The distribution of inter-node loss rates is relatively uniform over the whole range of loss rates; there is no clear threshold separating "in range" and "out of range." Most links have relatively stable loss rates from one second to the next, though a small minority have very bursty losses at that time scale. Signal-to-noise ratio and distance have little predictive value for loss rate. The large number of links with intermediate loss rates is probably due to multi-path fading rather than attenuation or interference.The phenomena discussed here are all well-known. The contributions of this paper are an understanding of their relative importance, of how they interact, and of the implications for MAC and routing protocol design.

This paper presents the expected transmission count metric (ETX), which finds high-throughput paths on multi-hop wireless networks. ETX minimizes the expected total number of packet transmissions (including retransmissions) required to successfully deliver a packet to the ultimate destination. The ETX metric incorporates the effects of link loss ratios, asymmetry in the loss ratios between the two directions of each link, and interference among the successive links of a path. In contrast, the minimum hop-count metric chooses arbitrarily among the different paths of the same minimum length, regardless of the often large differences in throughput among those paths, and ignoring the possibility that a longer path might offer higher throughput.This paper describes the design and implementation of ETX as a metric for the DSDV and DSR routing protocols, as well as modifications to DSDV and DSR which allow them to use ETX. Measurements taken from a 29-node 802.11b test-bed demonstrate the poor performance of minimum hop-count, illustrate the causes of that poor performance, and confirm that ETX improves performance. For long paths the throughput improvement is often a factor of two or more, suggesting that ETX will become more useful as networks grow larger and paths become longer.