Saluki: a High-Performance Wi-Fi Sniffing Program

Overview & Synopsis

Building a campus-wide wireless LAN measurement system faces many efficiency, scalability and security challenges. To address these challenges, we developed a distributed Wi-Fi sniffing program called Saluki. Compared to our previous implementation and to other available sniffing programs, Saluki has the following advantages: (1) its small footprint makes it suitable for a resource-constrained Linux platform, such as those in commercial Wi-Fi access points; (2) the frame-capture rate increased more than three-fold over tcpdump with minimal frame loss; (3) all traffic between this sniffer and the back-end server was secured using 128-bit encryption; and (4) the traffic load on the backbone network was reduced to only 30% of that in our previous implementation. In this paper, we introduce the design and the implementation details of this high-performance sniffing program, along with preliminary evaluation results.