A Scalable Wireless LAN Monitoring And Auditing Scheme

Promiscuous monitoring of Wi-Fi networks has often been a source of confusion. It appears logical that if any Ethernet adapter can be used for promiscuous mode monitoring in a wired Ethernet network, then any Wireless Ethernet adapter is equally good for doing the same in a 802.11 a, b, or g network. Theoretically, this is true, but in practice, this is very far from reality because not all wireless NICs support promiscuous mode. Therefore to solve the problem related to wireless NICs and when all we need to monitor is the traffic between wireless stations and the internet ; the proposed network layout by using a standard, non-wireless monitor on a mirror port would make it possible to capture the packets being sent and received through the access point . In addition , a software monitoring system named "Effective Wireless Monitoring Tool" has been built to help the network administrator to discover network problems as soon as possible.The proposed system achieves its goals by sniffing,capturing ,and analyzing the network traffic data packets without affecting or interfering with the network information flow by configuring the network in promiscuous mode.