Design and development of a management solution for wireless mesh networks based on IEEE 802.11s

The broad availability of WLAN-capable off-the-shelf hardware lets WLAN mesh networks appear as promising technology for future distributed wireless applications. Featuring automatic device discovery, interconnection and routing, they provide a higher scalability, flexibility, and robustness compared to common centralized WLAN infrastructures. Besides these advantages, characteristics such as variable network topologies and link qualities imply new technical challenges for administration and real-world operation. Adopted in late 2011, IEEE 802.11s appears as new WLAN standard amendment, enabling vendor-independent mesh networks based on the widespread WLAN technology. However, network monitoring and management fall out of the standardization scope and are therefore not specified. In this paper, we present a novel 802.11s management solution based on the SNMP protocol. It covers dynamic mesh bootstrapping, error recovery, status monitoring and remote configuration. The presented solution was implemented and evaluated in a real-world testbed comprising more than 10 mesh nodes.