Can user-level probing detect and diagnose common home-wlan pathologies

Common Wireless LAN (WLAN) pathologies include low signal-to-noise ratio, congestion, hidden terminals or inter-ference from non-802.11 devices and phenomena. Prior work has focused on the detection and diagnosis of such problems using layer-2 information from 802.11 devices and special-purpose access points and monitors, which may not be gen-erally available. Here, we investigate a user-level approach: is it possible to detect and diagnose 802.11 pathologies with strictly user-level active probing, without any cooperation from, and without any visibility in, layer-2 devices? In this paper, we present preliminary but promising results indicat-ing that such diagnostics are feasible