Wireless networks are fundamentally more difficult to manage than wired networks. The wireless medium is more unpredictable, and the performance on the network varies significantly with location. In this talk, I will first motivate the need for a dense deployment of sensors for managing enterprise Wireless LANs (WLANs) and then present a new system, called DAIR (for Dense Array of Inexpensive Radios), that achieves this requirement. DAIR is based on two observations. First, in most enterprise environments, one finds plenty of desktop machines with good wired connectivity, and spare CPU and disk resources. Second, inexpensive USB-based wireless adapters are commonly available. By attaching these adapters to desktop machines, and dedicating the adapters to the task of monitoring the wireless network, we create a low cost management infrastructure.

We have built and deployed three applications on top of the DAIR framework. First, we use DAIR to detect security breaches, such as rogue APs, in the enterprise WLAN. Second, DAIR helps us locate Wi-Fi clients and identify regions of poor or no WLAN coverage. Finally, we are exploring a new architecture where we can turn every desktop into an Access Point to improve the capacity of the WLAN. I will present these three applications and some of the other work I am currently doing. The DAIR project is joint work with Jitu Padhye, Alec Wolman, Brian Zill, Rohan Murty and Victor Bahl.

Bio:
Ranveer Chandra is a Researcher in the Networking Research Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. He completed his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2005. As part of his thesis he developed VirtualWiFi, which is a virtualization architecture for wireless cards. The software has been downloaded more than 70,000 times, and was covered by various sites, including CNET, eWeek and Slashdot. More recently he has been working on cognitive radios and various aspects of wired and wireless network management.