A Light-Weight Multi-Agent System Manages 802.11 Mesh Networks

A light-weight multi-agent system is employed in a “self-organisation of multi-radio mesh networks” project to manage 802.11 mesh networks. As 802.11 mesh networks can be extremely large the two main challenges are the scalability and stability of the solution. The basic approach is that of a distributed, light-weight, co-operative multiagent system that guarantees scalability. As the solution is distributed it is unsuitable to achieve any global optimisation goal — in any case, we argue that global optimisation of mesh network performance in any significant sense is not feasible in real situations that are subjected to unanticipated perturbations and external intervention. Our overall goal is simply to reduce maintenance costs for such networks by removing the need for humans to tune the network settings. So stability of the algorithms is our main concern.