Online Monitoring of eduroam Network: a Case Study

Monitoring a wireless network is crucial to detect situations that may cause service malfunction, such as other networks in the same wireless space (e.g., ad-hoc, unauthorised, etc.) and malicious behaviour. To control the use of eduroam network in the Departamento de Informática of the Universi-dade do Minho, and to allow planning future updates of the infrastructure, traffic was collected and processed from 33 Access Points (APs) in order to provide real-time results for analysis. In this context, a web application with a friendly interface and topological data was developed, which allows monitoring in realtime the entire wireless environment in the department, while identifying and locating incorrect behavior and/or performance degradation. In the development, PHP and Javascript were used for data processing and user interaction, while RRTool was used for storing data. The obtained results allow to conclude that the existing APs are not currently overloaded. However, the rapid increase in the number of connected devices may compromise the quality of using the eduroam network. Therefore, the developed monitoring application is crucial to assist the current usage and plan the future evolution of eduroam infrastructure.