Coordinated Sampling to Improve the Efficiency of Wireless Network Monitoring

Wireless networks are deployed in home, university, business, military and hospital environments, and are increasingly used for mission-critical applications like VoIP or financial applications. Monitoring the health of these networks, whether it is for failure, coverage or attacks, is important in terms of security, connectivity, cost, and performance. Effective monitoring of wireless network traffic, using commodity hardware, is a challenging task due to the limitations of the hardware. IEEE 802.11 networks support multiple channels, and a wireless interface can monitor only a single channel at one time.