Operations, administration and maintenance (OAM) features for reliable and available wireless (RAW) networks

Though the requirements are well defined and established, the adoption of radios for mission critical applications is lagging due to the fuzzy transmission characteristics of the wireless medium. To enable automation and safety applications, in particular for Machine-to-Machine traffic, strict reliability and availability demands must be met end-to-end. The Reliable and Available Wireless (RAW) Working Group (WG) aims specifically at enabling such guarantees by leveraging end-to-end Layer 3 services to compensate for the lossiness of the lower layers. In this letter, we present the Operation, Administration and Management (OAM) requirements to support industrial requirements. We detail first the operation challenge, the tools to verify that the network works properly, and to detect possibly faults. Then, we explain why we need to administrate the network to know in real time the state and the resources provisioned. Finally, we detail the mechanisms to make the network reliable and fault-tolerant.