Wi-Fi (R) Channel Load Estimation Based On Control Frames Metrics

Estimation of channel usage is very important to efficiently manage IEEE 802.11-based Wi-Fi networks. The standard approach to estimate the traffic load or busy time of the channel is to passively monitor data frames exchanged over the air interface. However, this method is unfeasible when the network implements the latest versions of the standard or when the interferer is non Wi-Fi traffic such as Bluetooth or the uprising LTE-U.This paper presents an innovative approach to estimate the channel load based on information extracted from the control frames. Control frames are always sent in the legacy format and therefore can be easily captured with any device. Extensive tests have been performed to obtain a correlation between certain control frames metrics and channel achievable throughput.