WiMFlow: a distributed, self-adaptive architecture for flow monitoring in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

We present WiMFlow, a dynamic and self-organized flow monitoring framework in Wireless Mesh Networks. The protocol allows for an autonomic organization of the probes, with the goal of monitoring all the flows in the backbone of the mesh network accurately and robustly, while minimizing the overhead introduced by the monitoring architecture. A new mechanism that adapts the control messages emission interval to changes in the topology is introduced to keep the cost of the monitoring overlay low. The proposed mechanism is described and the performance of the monitoring framework is evaluated by simulation and experiments on a small scale wireless mesh network testbed.

On monitoring overhead impact in wireless mesh networks

“…Chaudet et al in [2] found that in terms of deployment costs it may be more advantageous to monitor only 95% of the traffic, thus reducing the number of probes required. The work presented in [9] describes WiMFlow, a self-organized monitoring framework for WMNs. The proposed mechanism adapts the packet rate of control messages based on the topology changes in order to keep the overhead low.…”