airtime-pie-chart

Airtime Pie Chart is a tool to evaluate used airtime of IEEE 802.11 / WiFi stations and illustrate them in a Pie Chart.

This tool has been created as part of the fair airtime scheduling research at Open-Mesh Inc.

Compilation

airtime_analyzer depends on:

• libpcap development files

airtime-pie-chart depends on:

• GNU R

To compile airtime_analyzer, simply type:

make

Capture WiFi input data

A monitor interface has to be created to capture the radiotap information for each packet. Make sure that network manager is disabled before trying to create this device:

iw phy phy0 interface add mon type monitor flags control
ip link set up dev mon

Make sure that no other tool converted the new monitor interface back to a managed interface:

iw dev

Set the correct channel and channel width:

iw dev mon set channel 11 HT20

Capture the radiotap information and the start of the packets:

tcpdump -i mon -s 200 -w aircap.pcap

The capture can be stopped at any time via CTRL+C

Analyze the pcap file

The airtime_analyzer can parse the airtime.pcap and calculate for each mac address how much time was spend sending it traffic. This data should be stored in a text file to create a pie chart via airtime-pie-chart.R:

./airtime_analyzer aircap.pcap > airtime-pie-chart.dat

Generate PIE chart

The data file generated in the previous step can be send through GNU R to generate a simple PIE chart:

R --no-save < airtime-pie-chart.R
xdg-open airtime-pie-chart.png

Author

This software has been written by Sven Eckelmann <sven.eckelmann@open-mesh.com> for Open-Mesh Inc.

License

airtime_analyzer is licensed under the terms of version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Please see the LICENSE file.