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projects:wifi:scan_1

Project Wifi Scanner: Data Scan 1

I was curious to see how much I could detect with an off the shelf setup (standard PCIe wifi card with an external 10cm antenna) running in my living room for a week. Here are the numbers so far:

Raw size: 2,077,031,816 bytes (2.0Gb) (14,991,993 lines of tcpdump data)
2019-09-11 22:21 to 2019-09-19 06:13 (approx 7 days, 7 hours and 52 minutes) 10,554 minutes
Unique MAC addresses seen: 68,298

Unfiltered raw log data. Notice the peaks at 8am and 5pm on weekdays.

  • There are about 146 devices permanently 'on' near to the antenna (I saw their signal consistently 10% of the scanning time which corresponds to the scan frequency at the time - I was changing channel up to 10 times a second).
  • 30 of these 146 devices I saw 90% of the time despite channel hopping, so they were either putting out enough packets to get on the list or they are routers on multiple frequencies or just near enough to the antenna they are always heard first.

Collected MACs

Time Average Min Max Median
hourly 345 183 574 357
30-minute 251 149 447 255

MAC Activity

Time Average Min Max Median
hourly 345 183 574 357
30-minute 251 149 447 255

Wifi devices per hour

Wifi devices per 30 minutes

Wifi devices per hour (background devices removed)

Wifi devices per 30 minutes (background devices removed)

General MAC address packet count distribution

MAC addresses seen only once at all25,318
MAC addresses seen 2-9 times 37,436
MAC addresses seen 10-99 times 4,917
MAC addresses seen 100-999 times 399
MAC addresses seen 1,000-9,999 times 119
MAC addresses seen 10,000-99,999 times 74
MAC addresses seen 100,000-999,999 times 42
MAC addresses seen 1million+ times 4

How many MAC addresses were seen in distinct periods (minutes)

MAC addresses seen 1-3 times65,555
MAC addresses seen 4-10 times1,585
MAC addresses seen 11-30 times572
MAC addresses seen 31-40 times87
MAC addresses seen 41-50 times51
MAC addresses seen 51-70 times64
MAC addresses seen 101-200 times86
MAC addresses seen 201-300 times26
MAC addresses seen 301-500 times40
MAC addresses seen 501-998 times40
MAC addresses seen 999+ times146
projects/wifi/scan_1.txt · Last modified: 2019/10/11 16:45 by neil