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Show THE GEOGRAPHY OF WIRELESS NETWORKS (URBAN DATA CLOUDS) Edward F. Pultar Department of Geography Edward F. Pultar (Paul Torrens) Department of Geography The geography of wireless networks (or urban data clouds) is an emerging field of research among geographers and computer scientists. Wireless networking has recently burst into mainstream technology. I am researching wireless networks at the University of Utah by collecting data using a laptop, GPS device, and wireless network card. While traversing campus, data are collected including signal strength, noise, security settings, and network IDs. I wrote software (WifiCleanEd) that scrubs and reformats the raw data for import into the ESRI ArcGIS software suite. Within the GIS software I use geographical techniques to visualize and analyze the wireless network data. Techniques such as kriging interpolate the wireless signal strength and visualize an urban data cloud into three-dimensional maps. These maps can be output as high-quality graphics for campus wireless users. I am collecting more data and further researching this topic by studying issues such as security, privacy, and the area covered by a typical wireless access point. |