I'm looking for a tool that will summarize WiFi traffic per node. I'm not looking for fancy things like packet sniffing… the actual data that's being sent is irrelevant. I want a way to see that SSID Alpha is active and there's 100kbs of activity on it, SSID Beta is alive with no activity, etc.
Bonus if it lists the 802.11 type (a, b, g, n?) and channel number of each SSID.
Bonus if there's a graph of each network's activity over the past hour/day/week, or at least some accumulator of rough bytes transferred.
The problem I'm trying to solve is that in our building there's so many wifi beacons active, it's unclear which have traffic and which channels they're using. I'd like to see "wow, these are the two most busy SSIDs and they're both on channel 6, I'll switch to channel 12" or whatever. I'd also like to know if anyone ever uses some nodes we set up.. perhaps it's orphaned.
Either Windows or Linux tools are fine. Big bonus if it's free and I can just download and run it.
Any advice? Thanks!
Best Answer
I believe Netstumbler has some those features.
You could use a packet capture program such as kismet (or kismac if you have a mac) or airsnort to work out bytes transferred.