Beyond Management in Ad Hoc, Heterogeneous WPAN Environments: an Experimental Approach

This paper presents a hierarchical management architecture which has been designed to work over next generation WPAN environments. In this sense, it copes with e.g. ad hoc networks (likely to play a fundamental role within future wireless networks) as well as with low capacity devices, such as sensors and actuators (thus, highlighting the heterogeneity that also characterize these environments). The architecture uses both a traditional-management operation (based on SNMP) and a proprietary one. Furthermore, security concerns have also been considered. One of the main contributions of the paper is that it gives some insights about the implementation of the management architecture and on how the different pieces of information are managed. In particular, the paper discusses the following aspects: network topology, ad hoc routing mechanisms, sensors, and terminal status. The main goal of the implementation is to assess the feasibility of the proposed scheme over the high dynamic environments which have been targeted