Grant: Strategic Projects Supplemental Competition

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) and wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are widely deployed to provide ubiquitous wireless access to the Internet. Nowadays, many companies need to spend a significant amount of resources on network management within their IT (Information Technology) support group. Effective monitoring offers significant benefits to network operators, system designers, and researchers. It can provide network operators with valuable insight into the state of the network, which can in turn help them understand the network's topology and usage. Monitoring can also enable operators to perform critical tasks, such as fault detection/isolation, necessary for the robust operation of the network. In this project, we will develop advanced technologies and systems for adaptive, scalable, and pervasive wireless network monitoring. In particular, five specific research tasks are identified: (1) Development of threshold-based alarm triggering policies; (2) Design of performance monitoring signaling protocols; (3) Design of load balancing and measurement-based admission control algorithms. (4) Develop realistic mobility models; (5) Design of distributed passive monitoring schemes with wireless sensor nodes. We will address the set of new issues arising from the latest wireless environment, and will focus not only on the implementation and improvement of the individual modules in network monitoring, but also on their joint optimizations and interactions that present many additional challenges and opportunities to service providers, network operators, and end users. For proof-of-concept and technology transfer, we will implement our proposed schemes in a testbed. The main benefit of our work is a reduction of the network deployment and management costs, and an improvement on service availability. Results are intended to find practical solutions and applications for the benefit of Canadian and the global telecommunication industries.