I have a D-Link DSL-604T wireless router in my house, connected to an ADSL line. It all seems to be working peachy, except that there apparently is a lot of wireless traffic, as indicated by the WiFi light on my laptop, which is essentially always on. At the same time, though, monitoring my network interfaces on the laptop, I can see that I'm not really receiving any additional Ethernet packets beyond my normal traffic. So, even if there is no traffic visible on my wireless Ethernet interface, the WiFi light still indicates strong activity. When I travel and use different wireless networks then this is not the case. The WiFi-activity light on the laptop actually goes dark then occasionally. But never here in my house, where it is always on.
So, there is this constant WiFi traffic background noise in my house, and I wonder what it means and where it comes from. I looked into the statistics of the router and found the following:
Transmit
MPDUs 26031588
MSDUs 26034767
Multicast MSDUs 491218
Failed MSDUs 3179
Retry MSDUs 3179
Receive
MPDUs 24573052
MSDUs 30494535
Multicast MSDUs 317964
FCS Error MPDUs 5
The MPDU and MSDU counts for both send and receive are increasing by around 100 to 300 per second. When I look in the router's stats for Ethernet or ADSL, though, I don't see any corresponding increase.
When I scan for wireless networks in the area, I can see a single other network (the neighbour), and I assume that this is just a normal home network. Could traffic on that network in any way be counted in the WiFi stats of my router and my laptop? Actually, I just scanned again, and they currently seem to have their router switched off, because I can't see their network. At the same time, the mad activity on my WiFi network continues...
Any idea what's going on?
