MeshMan: A management framework for wireless mesh networks

Abstract

As wireless mesh networks become more popular, there exists a need to provide centralized management solutions, which facilitate network administrators to control, troubleshoot and collect statistics from their networks. Managing wireless mesh networks poses unique challenges due to limited bandwidth resources and dynamic channel quality. A robust management solution should function despite network layer failure. In this paper, we propose MeshMan, a network layer agnostic, low overhead solution to network management to cope with unreliable wireless channels, link and network level dynamics in wireless mesh networks. It combines the concepts of source routing with hierarchical addressing, and provides a native efficient query interface. A prototype of MeshMan has been implemented as a user space daemon on Linux and evaluated using a 12-node wireless mesh network testbed. Experimental studies demonstrate that MeshMan has comparable or better performance than the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) in management overhead and response times when the network is stable while having much better performance in presence network dynamics.