WMM - Wireless Mesh Monitoring Ricardo Pinto
[email protected] Instituto Superior T´ecnico Advisor: Professor Lu´ısRodrigues Abstract. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) have emerged as a poten- tial technology to quickly deploy a wireless infrastructure that is self- healing, self-configured, and self-organized. This report makes an in- troduction to WMNs, their protocols and some existing deployments. Then the problem of monitoring the operation of these networks, is ad- dressed by making a brief survey on some relevant network monitoring approaches and by pointing directions of future work in this area. 1 Introduction Within the short span of a decade, wireless networks have revolutionized the way we use our devices, bringing us cable-free mobility, always-on connectiv- ity, and reduced infrastructure costs. In the past few years, we have witnessed a tremendous growth of wireless LANs (WLANs) mainly due to their ease of deployment and maintenance. However, all wireless access points (APs) need to be connected to the wired backbone network and, therefore, WLANs still re- quire extensive infrastructure and careful planning in order to minimize their costs. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have emerged as a key technology to ease the deployment of wireless networks. Unlike traditional WiFi networks, in WMNs only a subset of APs are required to be connected to the wired network. As a result, only a subset of the nodes need wired infrastructure (these nodes serve as gateways) while the other mesh nodes have the ability to route mes- sages to the gateways, thus providing also access to the Internet. A WMN is a dynamically self-organized and self-configured network in which the nodes au- tomatically establish and maintain connectivity.