Big Data Analytics for User Association Characterization in Large-Scale WiFi System

Large-scale WiFi systems have been widely deployed in an increasing number of corporate places such as universities, big malls and companies, to provide fast Internet experience to users. However, user association patterns in such large-scale systems have not been well investigated, which is crucial for performance enhancement and intelligent system management. In this paper, we provide the analytics of a large-scale campus WiFi dataset, which includes more than 8,000 access points (APs) and 40,000 active users in the area of 3.0925 km². By conducting extensive analysis on association patterns, we achieve several key insights as follows. First, user associations are highly dynamic as short association durations and frequent AP transitions prevail throughout the whole trace. Second, even though users may associate to many APs, they generally have a small preferable AP set in which they spend most of their WiFi connection time for data traffic; in addition, each user has distinct yet relatively fixed AP transition route, indicating that given its current associated AP, its next association AP is highly predictable. Third, diurnal association patterns are observed not only at single AP level, but also at the building and the system level, where the number of associated users and the data traffic vary periodically on a daily basis. These insights can provide valuable guidelines to numerous intelligent service provisions such as proactive service migration, edge content distribution, efficient network management.