A recente aposta das universidades europeias nas redes locais sem fios - Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), como forma de disponibilizar à comunidade académica um serviço de mobilidade, trouxe inúmeras vantagens, mas é de extrema importância perceber até que ponto é que os seus utilizadores tiram proveito desta tecnologia e qual é o seu comportamento. Neste trabalho foram analisadas as WLANs de dois campi universitários pertencentes às Universidades do Minho e de Vigo. O estudo realizado tem por objectivo identificar padrões de comportamento dos utilizadores e o grau de utilização dos recursos de rede, respondendo à questão: qual a utilização efectiva das WLANs em análise? Os resultados deste trabalho, aqui reportados para o caso da Universidade do Minho, demonstram que o local de acesso tem influência no número de utilizadores associados, no volume de tráfego gerado, no número e duração das sessões, fornecendo importantes indicadores para o planeamento, dimensionamento e investimento nas WLANs universitárias.

The eduroam initiative is assuming an ever growing relevance in providing a secure, worldwide roaming access within the university WLAN context. Although several studies have focused on educational WLAN traffic characterisation, the increasing variety of devices, mobility scenarios and user applications, motivate assessing the effective use of eduroam in order to sustain consistent network planning and deployment. Based on recent WLAN traffic traces collected at the University of Minho (Portugal) and University of Vigo (Spain), the present work contributes for identifying and characterising patterns of user behaviour regarding, for instance, the location and activity sector of users. The results of data analysis quantify the impact of network access location on the number of associated users, on the number and duration of sessions and corresponding traffic volumes. The results also illustrate to what extent users take advantage of mobility in the WLAN. Complementing the analysis on a monthly basis, a fine grain study of WLAN traffic is provided through the identification of users' behaviour and patterns in small timescales.

The recent commitment of European Universities to join a global wireless access and roaming infrastructure through the eduroam initiative has brought many advantages to the academic community. In a new environment of increasing user mobility, it is useful to study and understand the users' behaviour when accessing the wireless network infrastructure. This paper is focused on characterising the real network usage within university campuses, based on WLAN traffic traces collected at the University of Minho (Portugal). The obtained results, allowing to identify user trends and quantify the influence of access location on the number of associated users, the number and duration of sessions, the volume of generated traffic, and user mobility indicators, provide important directions for planning future improvements of university WLANs.