A Measurement Study of a Commercial-Grade Urban WiFi Mesh

The authors present a measurement study of a large-scale urban WiFi mesh network consisting of more than 250 Mesh Access Points (MAPs), with paying customers that use it for Inter-net access. The study, involved collecting multi-modal data, e.g., through continuous gathering of SNMP logs, syslogs, passive traffic capture, and limited active measurements in different parts of the city. The study is split into four components planning and deployment of the mesh, success of mesh routing techniques, likely experience of users, and characterization of how the mesh is utilized. During the data collection process that spanned 8 months, the network changed many times due to hardware and software upgrades.