SWAT: Fingerprinting Your Wireless Network

The Stanford Wireless Analysis Tool (SWAT) is a software tool for characterizing wireless networks. It runs automated, user-configurable measurement experiments on any given mesh network and collects per-packet and per-node statistics. SWAT distills these statistics into a handful of metrics such as temporal and spatial correlation of packet receptions. These metrics help users understand how different protocols, such as opportunistic routing and network coding, behave in a given network. Understanding why a protocol behaves the way it does will improve future protocol design as well as allow existing protocols to be fine-tuned to a specific environment.