Facilitating adaptation to trouble spots in wireless MANs

This paper presents schemes that enable high level communications protocols and applications to adapt to connectivity loss and quality degradation in metropolitan area wireless networks. We postulate that the majority of these problem areas or trouble spots, which are intrinsic to wireless networks, are related to location and environmental factors. Based on this premise, we propose a mechanism that gathers semantic data pertaining to trouble spots; prior knowledge of such locations can be used by higher-level communication protocols to preemptively adapt, thereby avoiding undesirable effects at the application level. To facilitate the detection and categorization of trouble spots, we propose a list of metrics to analyze the status of a wireless service. We report on our experiences with using these metrics to identify trouble spots and present initial results from an experimental evaluation of their effectiveness.