Autonomic wireless network management

Abstract

This paper presents a decentralized approach for the autonomic management of a group of collaborating base stations to provide efficient and effective wireless network access in highly dynamic environments. It provides a management platform that supports many different management functions based on common mechanisms for information exchange, transactional semantics and security. A central feature of the system is the inclusion of monitored feedback information into the autonomic management process, which can enhance the operation of the management system and the quality of its decisions. An integrated monitoring component provides this feedback information by monitoring the coverage area and analyzing the measurements in real time. A preliminary evaluation of the prototype implementation shows that the autonomic management system scales well. Performance is mostly proportional to the diameter of the network topology and does not heavily depend on the number of base stations present. Further experiments with the wireless monitoring sub-system demonstrate that it is feasible to automatically detected network problems caused by radio interference or active attacks. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2006.