Using Aruba sniffers

Purpose

The ORBIT grid has four Aruba sniffers at the four corners that can be configured to sniff specific channels and report every sniffed packet to the database. This gives the experimenters an independent framework to correlate 802.11 traffic during the course of the experiment for sanity checking as well as verifying the expected outcome of the experiment.

Nomenclature

The sniffers have been assigned the following IP addresses

Sniffer	IP	Position
aruba1-1	10.2.1.1	Near node1-20
aruba1-4	10.2.1.4	Near node1-4
aruba4-1	10.2.4.1	Near node20-20
aruba4-4	10.2.4.4	Near node20-1

Usage

Sniffers are already up and running. Currently they work only on b/g channels. Sniffers can be set to listen to a specific channel by using the following command from internal4 or idb1

telnet 10.2.1.4
#> echo "channel 1" >> /proc/net/wifi0/config

Backend data collection

In order to start collecting frames in the database, you need to be on internal4.orbit-lab.org

• Download the following file to your local directory and call it config.xml

    <project id="monitor">
      <measurements>
        <db id="monitor" host="10.10.0.50" user="orbit" password="orbit"/>
        <multicast-channel addr="224.10.10.1" port="7000" iface="eth1"/>
      </measurements>
    </project>
  

• Launch the following application from local directory

   monitor -c config.xml -n internal4 -i eth2
  

The sniffed packets are reported to the database named monitor under the table frames

Capture Schema

Field

Type

id	mediumint(9)
monitor_id	varchar(32)
channel	int(11)
flag	int(11)
rate	int(11)
snr	int(11)
type	int(11)
sub_type	int(11)
duration	varchar(32)
dst_addr	varchar(32)
src_addr	varchar(32)
receiver_addr	varchar(32)
frag_num	int(11)
seq_num	int(32)
timestamp	varchar(32)
frame_description	varchar(32)
beacon_timestamp	varchar(32)
ssid	varchar(32)

For Developers

For developers interested in playing around with the code, go here