Differences and performance in monitoring mode of selected WiFi chipsets

Abstract

WiFi devices are generally used for network communication and the WiFi device drivers or hardware will filter all radio frames which are not destined for the device itself. In some use cases, this is not desired, for example when doing, network analysis, war-driving or mobile device positioning. Some of these use cases are only possible by activating monitor mode on the device. In this mode, the device will not filter frames. We investigated if there are differences in performance and behavior between different WiFi devices and found that there is a difference. We found that some devices perform worse when we inject frames with a lower delay between frames. We also find that the choice of hardware for injecting frames affects the number of received frames, even if we account for antenna and radio signal quality differences.