Wi-Fi Wardriving Studies Must Account for Important Statistical Issues

Abstract: Knowledge of Wi-Fi networks helps to guide future engineering and spectrum policy decisions. However, due to its unlicensed nature, the deployment of Wi-Fi Access Points is undocumented meaning researchers are left making educated guesses as to the prevalence of these assets through remotely collected or passively sensed measurements. One commonly used method is referred to as wardriving essentially where a vehicle is used to collect geospatial statistical data on wireless networks to inform mobile computing and networking security research. Surprisingly, there has been very little examination of the statistical issues with wardriving data, despite the vast number of analyses being published in the literature using this approach. In this paper, a sample of publicly collected wardriving data is compared to a predictive model for Wi-Fi Access Points. The results demonstrate several statistical issues which future wardriving studies must account for, including selection bias, sample representativeness and the modifiable areal unit problem.