Antler: A multi-tiered approach to automated wireless network management

Management of a large scale wireless network, be it an infrastructured WLAN or a metro-scale mesh network, presents several challenges. Troubleshooting problems related to wireless access in these networks requires a comprehensive set of metrics and network monitoring data. Current solutions gather large amounts of data and require significant bandwidth and processing to offload and analyze this management traffic. As a result, these solutions are typically not scalable or real-time. To this end, we propose a multi-tiered approach to wireless network monitoring that dynamically controls the granularity of data collection based on observed events in the network. Our approach can achieve significant bandwidth savings and enable real-time automated management of a wireless network. Our initial analysis using traces from a large WLAN shows a significant reduction in the amount of data collected to diagnose problems in a WLAN.