A study of overheads and accuracy for efficient monitoring of wireless mesh networks

IEEE 802.11-based wireless mesh networks are being increasingly deployed in enterprize and municipal settings. A lot of work has been done on developing measurement-based schemes for resource provisioning and fault management in these networks. The above goals require an efficient monitoring infrastructure to be deployed, which can provide the maximumamount of information regarding the network status, while utilizing the least possible amount of network resources. However, network monitoring involves overheads, which can adversely impact performance from the perspective of the end user. The impact of monitoring overheads on data traffic has been overlooked in most of the previous works. It remains unclear as to how parameters such as number of monitoring agents, or frequency of reportingmonitoring data, among others, impact the performance of awireless network. In this work, we first evaluate the impact of monitoring overheads on data traffic, and show that even small amounts of overhead can cause a large degradation in the network performance. We then explore several different techniques for reducing monitoring overheads, while maintaining the objective (resource provisioning, fault management, and others) that needs to be achieved. Via extensive simulations and experiments, we validate the efficiency of our proposed approaches in reducing overheads, their impact on the quality of data collected from the network, and the impact they have on the performance of the applications using the collected data. Based on results, we conclude that it is feasible to make the current monitoring techniques more efficient by reducing the communication overheads involved while still achieving the desired application-layer objectives. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.