Paper Accepted – Passive WiFi

[December 3, 2020] Our journalized version of the paper on leveraging passive WiFi characteristics for determining the available bandwidth was recently accepted to appear in the IEEE Internet of Things journal.

Very cool paper that leverages the spacing of plaintext block acknowledgements (ACKs) for the purpose of inferring the utilization on a given wireless link. In the paper, we show not only the feasibility of leveraging block ACKs for inferring bandwidth but we also demonstrate that such an approach would be viable during the normal WiFi scanning process (e.g. detecting block ACKs during a WiFi scanning sweep looking for nearby APs) is enough time to reasonably infer the available bandwidth.