This page contains information on how to access the data about RF device usage studied in the IMC 2011 paper titled Airshark: Detecting Non-WiFi RF Devices using Commodity WiFi Hardware .
We collected the RF device usage measurements using a signal analyzer at 21 locations. We broadly categorize these locations into three categories: (i) cafes (L1-L7): these included coffee shops, malls, book-stores (ii) enterprises (L8-L14): offices, university departments, libraries and (iii) homes (L15-L21): these included apartments and independent houses. Measurements were taken over a period of 5 weeks (04/2011 to 05/2011). At some locations, we could collect data for more than 24 hours (e.g., enterprises, homes) but for others we could collect measurements only during the day times for a few hours (e.g., coffee shops, malls).
Measurement data corresponding to each location is in a separate file (21 files in total), and are labeled as <environment>_Location<index>.csv" : here <environment> is Cafe/Enterprise/Home and <index> goes from 1 to 21. The data is in the form of comma separated values. Each row consists of 29 fields. Below, we explain the fields and their description.
| Field Name | Description |
| RecordId (Field 1) | A unique value that identifies this interference event. It corresponds to a row id. |
| Field 2 | Ignore |
| Interferer Type (Field 3) | Represents a class of non-WiFi device (e.g., Bluetooth, Analog Cordless Phone etc.) |
| Interferer Start Time (Field 4) | The time the interference started. The time is the number of seconds since the Unix time epoch, i.e. seconds since midnight Jan 1, 1970 UTC. We use the standard C/C++ library functions time() to get the value and strftime() to convert the value into human readable time and date. Please refer to time.h for function prototypes. |
| Interferer Stop Time (Field 5) | The time the interference stopped. The time is number of seconds since the Unix time epoch. |
| Field 6 | Ignore |
| Field 7 | Ignore |
| Field 8 | Ignore |
| Min RSSI (Field 9) | The minimum Receive Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) value sampled for the interference event. |
| Max RSSI (Field 10) | The maximum RSSI value sampled for the interference event. |
| Avg RSSI (Field 11) | The average of all RSSI samples taken for the interference event. |
| Center frequency (Field 12) | Center frequency of the interference event. The frequency value is in units of kHz. |
| Number of Impacted WiFi channels (Field 13) | The number of WiFi channels impacted by the interference from this device |
| Impacted channels (Fields 14 - 29) | Sixteen fields that list the WiFi channel numbers impacted by the interference. Field 13 indicates how many of the fields are actually have channel values. For example, when Field 13=4, then Fields 14, 15, 16, and 17 contain the channel values impacted by this device. Unused fields are set to zero. |