A distributed network monitoring framework for wireless networks

Multi-hop wireless networks are emerging as a viable alternative for building access networks in areas where conventional solutions (cellular, fiber) are neither feasible nor attractive from an economical standpoint. The management of such networks represents an overly complex task because of the time-varying nature of the radio channel, the mobility of users and the presence of adaptive, self-configuration features. Various solutions are currently being researched, whereby network management functionalities are performed autonomously at the network nodes themselves. Such approaches require a monitoring framework able to bring network-level information to the relevant decision points in an effective and robust manner. In this paper, we present a distributed network monitoring framework, specifically developed for wireless multi-hop networks. The system architecture and the protocols are presented together with results obtained using a prototypical implementation over a real-world testbed. Experimental results show that the framework generates a limited amount of traffic, and that the system is able to consistently recover from node failures.