MeshMon: a multi-tiered framework for wireless mesh network monitoring

Monitoring and troubleshooting a large wireless mesh network (WMN) presents several challenges. Diagnosis of problems related to wireless access in these networks requires a comprehensive set of metrics and network monitoring data. Collection and offloading of a large amount of data are infeasible in a bandwidth constrained mesh network. Additionally, the processing required to analyze data from the entire network restricts the scalability of the system and impacts the ability to perform real-time fault diagnosis. To this end, we propose MeshMon, a network monitoring framework that includes a multi-tiered method of data collection. MeshMon dynamically controls the granularity of data collection based on observed events in the network, thereby achieving significant bandwidth savings and enabling real-time automated management. Our evaluation of MeshMon on a real testbed shows that we can diagnose a majority (87%) of network faults with a 66% savings in bandwidth required for network monitoring. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.