Characterising Eduroam WLANs Usage Trends: A Case Study

The recent commitment of European Universities to join a global wireless access and roaming infrastructure through the eduroam initiative has brought many advantages to the academic community. In a new environment of increasing user mobility, it is useful to study and understand the users´ behaviour when accessing the wireless network infrastructure. This paper is focused on characterising the real network usage within university campuses, based on WLAN traffic traces collected at the University of Minho (Portugal). The obtained results, allowing to identify user trends and quantify the influence of access location on the number of associated users, the number and duration of sessions, the volume of generated traffic, and user mobility indicators, provide important directions for planning future improvements of university WLANs.