Cristi Popi
| Summary | |
| Student: | Cristi Popi |
| Title: | Management of Wireless Mesh Networks |
| e-mail: | cristi.popi@loria.fr |
| Affiliation: | INRIA |
| Supervisor: | Olivier Festor |
| Committee: | |
| Start: | 2006 |
| End: | 2009 |
| Funding: | Centre de Recherche INRIA Nancy - Grand Est |
Biography
PhD project description
The subject of my thesis is the management of community based Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN). Wireless mesh networks extend the Wireless LAN architecture by providing wireless connections between Access Points (AP), thus enlarging the surface of coverage, and allowing for a cheap deployment of internet access where cabling is costly (ie. high density of users).
The architecture of a WMN is two tiered, with the layers consisting of: access points on one side, and client nodes on the other side.
The access points form a mesh of fixed nodes, also known as the network infrastructure, or backbone. The backbone can rely on various radio technologies (amongst which IEEE 802.11) for interconnection. The access points have a double function: that of providing access to roaming clients, and of relaying data for other routers which communicate with each other in a wireless multi-hop manner. Some of the routers act as gateways for connectivity with other wireless mesh networks, or other types of networks, including wired ones. The interconnection feature of wireless mesh networks allow them to provide internet services to their clients.
The clients are devices with wireless capabilities, typically laptops, PDAs or IP phones. They connect to the network by positioning themselves in the accesability area of a mesh router, which relays their packets to/from the desired destination. The clients can form an ad-hoc network by adding extra functions (ie. routing), either for relaying packets for clients that are out of the reachability of access points, either for directly communicating between themselves in a peer-to-peer manner (the case for Client WMNs and Hybrid WMNs).
In this context we are interested in monitoring and doing fault management for an interconection infrastructure that is based entirely on wireless local networks operating in a public frequency range. The motivation is the ever more increasing deployment of 802.11 networks in densely populated locations, for offering Internet connection services via access points (AP). The deployment of these networks is spontaneous and for the moment being there is neither coordination, nor collaboration between the covered zones. We are searching for means of deploying self-management mechanisms to overcome the characteristics of community WMNs: mobility and heterogeneity.
We investigate the use of a Distributed Hash Table based Peer-to-Peer service to maintain the distributed monitoring history of a hybrid ad-hoc/MESH network topology. Our approach supports merging and splitting of monitoring overlays over time and enables various management functions (e.g. fault, performance, configuration) to rebuild a model of the network topology at any time in the past of its history.
References
- Dynamic Distributed Monitoring and Logging of Topology Information in Wireless MESH Networks. Popi C., Festor O. Submitted
External links
- [_URL_ Homepage] of Cristi Popi
- Publications of Cristi Popi, as indexed by DBLP
