About the tool

The tool collects wireless traces from home networks. It collects Physical layer and mac layer information per frame. It collects physical layer information as queuing delays, errors counters, signal strength in the device driver. At the mac layer, it collects the 802.11 mac-layer headers. We collect anonymized mac address of the device as a unique id. We do not collect any sensitive information regarding users like the IP address of the websites visited, or any other information at the IP layer.

WifiDump records the manufacturer of each network device that accesses the Internet using your BISmark router by recording the first 3 bytes of each device's hardware identifier (MAC address). We use this information to differentiate between classes of devices (e.g. a video game console vs. a desktop computer).

The purpose of the tool is to understand home wireless networks. The tool is used for a longitudinal study of wireless home network and look at the adaptation scheme delays in the wireless network which might give us insight on the cause of poor performance of wifi inside homes.