Wireless Mesh Network Monitoring: Design, Implementation and Experiments

Abstract

Mesh networks conveniently complement infrastructurebased networks, allowing devices to spontaneously form a network and connect with other networks. However, effective service provisioning requires a network monitoring solution with adequate support for topology data dissemination and diagnosis, due to the underlying network dynamics and the absence of pre-existing network infrastructure. In addition, monitoring systems have to face a number of challenges relating to autonomy, robustness and scalability. To this end, we have created a self-organised management overlay that homogeneously and dynamically organises devices into a cluster-based hierarchy on which monitored data is disseminated. Scalability of the monitoring system is achieved through the minimisation of the generated traffic, as a result of the optimised design. We have implemented the proposed monitoring system and evaluated through experiments the resulting performance.

On monitoring overhead impact in wireless mesh networks

“…In the following, we describe the major work that had been performed in this topic. The authors in [4] propose a low overhead monitoring architecture customized for WMNs. Their approach is to automatically organize all nodes into a hierarchy of clusters dedicated to the delivery of monitoring data.…”

“…The evaluation is done using two performance metrics: robustness and scalability. The work in [4] lacks in evaluating the proposed method in the presence of user traffic. This traffic may suffer interference from the monitoring data that is transmitted in the network.…”

“…As stated in [4], monitoring implies two steps: the measurement of data, which can be active or passive, and the gathering of data, which can be classified into proactive or reactive. We consider a third phase, data dissemination, to be as important as the first two.…”

Flow Monitoring in Wireless MESH Networks

“…A self-configurable cluster-based monitoring system for a wireless mesh network is presented in [15]. Monitoring nodes are organized into a cluster-based hierarchical structure in a dynamical way; topological monitoring information, gathered from passively listening to OLSR (Optimized Link State Routing Protocol [7]) traffic is pushed up the hierarchical structure to a topology monitoring entity (which corresponds to a cluster head).…”

A Security Supervision System for Hybrid Networks

“…Considering the fact that there exists no unique grouping protocol that is optimal for any kind of network, we use a specialised grouping solutions for each type of network along with a mechanism for integrating them. We rely on the Nice protocol [3] which has been specifically designed for operating in infrastructure-based large-scale network (e.g., the Internet) and the Madeira protocol that comes from our previous research on network management [10] and is customised to operating over ad hoc networks. The reason that motivates our choice for the Nice protocol, is twofold.…”