A monitoring tool for Wireless Multi-hop Mesh Networks

WMN (Wireless Multi-hop Mesh Network) is currently a main topic and viewed as a promising and cost-effective solution to offer broadband Internet access: for instance, an area where deployment of wired infrastructure is not benefit (from economic perspective) or impossible such as rural zones. Furthermore, WMN enables to extend coverage thanks to the multi-hop capabilities of the routing protocol. The WMN is very interesting, and some network operators perform real-world experiments and plan a possible deployment of such networks in the near future. Also, MAN ET (Mobile Ad-hoc Network) is currently a promising solution because it can be deployed quickly as a temporary network, after a disaster for instance. However, multi-hop networking, used for both mesh networking and ad hoc networking presents specific characteristics compared to traditional wired or wireless infrastructure-based networks. Amongst others, the topology changes, the link instability, the interferences and influence of external parameters (human presence for instance) have a great impact on the network behavior and performance. Thus, deploying such a network without a monitoring tool is ineffective. This paper introduces a monitoring tool for multi-hop networks we have developed which allows network administrators as well as applications developers to have a better understanding of the networks status (global view of the network as well as information per node), the application behavior on the network and how the network state can impact their performance.