2020 Michigan IT Symposium Breakout Session
Introducing pSSID: A Wi-Fi Monitoring System Developed at Michigan

Presenters:
Edward Colone, Iffat Saiyara, Abigail Fox, Ian Thompson, & Konstantin Kovalchuk, ITS Network Infrastructure

WiFi has become an expected commodity in the research and education community, considered vital to productivity. Complete WiFi outages are obvious to users, but issues like performance degradation and loss of redundancy are not as easily observed, especially across multiple locations. pSSID is an open source active WiFi monitoring system developed at the University of Michigan. It is designed to detect and report performance issues on a large distributed campus from the user’s perspective. pSSID is currently undergoing it’s first field deployment here at the University of Michigan.  

pSSID is the output of a 2020 ITS Internship project. It was developed by a team of virtual software engineering interns collaborating with senior ITS Network Infrastructure staff. It utilizes other open-source software as under-laying components, such as perfSONAR for generating performance metrics, the RabbitMQ message bus for aggregating test results, Ansible for provisioning and configuration, and the ELKstack for data analysis and visualization. pSSID nodes on campus will be deployed on the latest Raspberry Pi Single Board Computer, an innovative low-cost computing platform.

This talk will inform the audience on advanced WiFi deployments, and strategies to monitor them. It will also discuss the software development effort required to implement the solution.