Skip to main content
Troubleshooting Wi-Fi networks at the protocol level involves the analysis of control, management, and data frames. When doing save-to-disk captures of these Wi-Fi frames for analysis, file sizes can grow very rapidly because of the payloads found in data frames. If you’re only interested in frame exchanges or need to meet data and privacy protection guidelines, saving this data might be unnecessary or prohibited. It might also be unnecessary if the wireless network uses encryption because, unless you have a way to decrypt it, the data would be unreadable. Frame slicing is a technique that saves just a portion of the beginning of each frame, disregarding the remaining bytes. Typically, capture tools can perform frame slicing on a fixed number of bytes, but because Wi-Fi frame headers don’t have a fixed length, a fixed number of bytes may or may not be sufficient to save the header portion of all data frames correctly. Airtool 2 performs automatic frame slicing, discarding exactly the Layer 3-7 payload, also known as MSDU. When data frame slicing is enabled, Airtool 2 will only store the 802.11 MAC header of data frames in the capture file.
Airtool 2 will automatically detect 802.11 MAC header’s size for each data frame to correctly discard the payload.
Even though Airtool 2 will disregard data frames’ payload when slicing is enabled, Airtool 2 will still store the original length as part of the capture metadata, so you know how many bytes of user data the frame was initially carrying.
To enable data frame slicing, go to the Airtool 2 menu bar extra > Settings > Advanced and select Do not save Layer 3-7 payload (MSDU).

​
See also