AirLab: consistency, fidelity and privacy in wireless measurements

Accurate measurements of deployed wireless networks are vital for researchers to perform realistic evaluation of proposed systems. Unfortunately, the difficulty of performing detailed measurements limits the consistency in parameters and methodology of current datasets. Using different datasets, multiple research studies can arrive at conflicting conclusions about the performance of wireless systems. Correcting this situation requires consistent and comparable wireless traces collected from a variety of deployment environments. In this paper, we describe AirLab, a distributed wireless data collection infrastructure that uses uniformly instrumented measurement nodes at heterogeneous locations to collect consistent traces of both standardized and user-defined experiments. We identify four challenges in the AirLab platform, consistency, fidelity, privacy, security, and describe our approaches to address them.