GIT-CERCS-06-10
Kipp Jones, Ling Liu,
What Where Wi: An Analysis of Millions of Wi-Fi Access Points
With the growing demand for wireless Internet access and increasing maturity of
IEEE 802.11 technologies, wireless networks have sprung up by the millions
throughout the world as a popular means for Internet access at homes, in
offices and in public areas, such as airports, cafés and coffee shops. An
increasingly popular use of IEEE 802.11 networking equipment is to provide
wireless "hotspots" as the wireless access points to the Internet. These
wireless access points, commonly referred to as WAPs or simply APs, are
installed and managed by individuals and businesses in an unregulated manner ^Ö
allowing anyone to install and operate one of these radio devices using
unlicensed radio spectrum. This has allowed literally millions of these APs to
become available and ^Ñvisible^Ò to any interested party who happens to be
within range of the radio waves emitted from the device. As the density of
these APs increases, these ^Ñbeacons^Ò can be put into multiple uses. From
home networking to wireless positioning to mesh networks, there are more alternative ways for
connecting wirelessly as newer, longer-range technologies come to market.
This paper reports an initial study that examines a database of over 5 million
wireless access points collected through wardriving by Skyhook Wireless. By
performing the analytical study of this data and the information revealed by
this data, including the default naming behavior, movement of access points
over time, and density of access points, we found that the AP data, coupled
with location information, can provide a fertile ground for understanding the
"What, Where and Why" of Wi-Fi access points. More importantly, the analysis
and mining of this vast and growing collection of AP data can yield important
technological, social and economical results.