Measurement of long-distance Wi-Fi connections: An empirical study

Abstract

Long-distance Wi-Fi technology has shown promise in several network applications that cannot utilize conventional technologies effectively. Although the network performance of WiFi technology is affected by a number of environmental factors, there is a dearth of long-term, continuous, and systematic studies on the correlations between those factors and the technology's performance. In this study, we deployed a long-distance Wi-Fi testbed on our campus and conducted a one-year experiment. Comprehensive data analysis of the measurement results shows that rainfall is the major weather attribute that affects the network performance of long-distance Wi-Fi links. In addition, the performance is highly correlated to human activities in the immediate vicinity. The results also demonstrate it is possible to infer people's daily routines on campus by exploiting the longterm measurement data.

Environmental causality calibration: Advancing WLAN RF fingerprinting for precise indoor localization

“…After all, the propagation of electromagnetic waves in the space medium would change with changes in climatic factors. For instance, the rain attenuation of electromagnetic waves was attributed to the RF absorption and attenuation by the raindrops in the atmosphere, which ultimately affected the communication performance [24].…”

Model Fitting to Account for the Weather’s Impact on Wireless Propagation at 2.4 GHz

“…Analysing how the weather impacts on outdoor wireless networks can be carried out from experimental data obtained by an accurate setup [6]. Once performance data and weather data are gathered by minute, they can be statically analysed in order to find precise correlations [7]. It has been shown that both groups of data (meteorological and wireless link quality) are significantly correlated [8], but this type of statistical analysis presents some limitations.…”