A Knowledge Plane for Wireless Mesh Networks

The quest for the autonomic management of communication systems dates back to more than two decades ago. In practice, it became a compelling need when such systems started growing in size and complexity. The risk, in fact, was that the support/management of the infrastructure became so expensive to be the major design constraint. In telecommunication networks, in particular, autonomicity is perceived practically as an alias of Autonomic Network Management (ANM) [1]: proper handling of network complexity, in fact, is perceived as a cornerstone for achieving robustness and performance. But, despite the expectations, whileANM is emerging as one of the hottest research topics, little concrete results have been achieved so far. This can be ascribed, on one hand, to the complexity of the issue itself, whose theoretical foundations have not been completed so far, and on the other one to the lack of a research platform on which novel solutions can be tested in a controlled and replicable fashion. In such a scenario, due to their reconfigurability and ease of deployment, wireless mesh networks provide us the opportunity to design from scratch an autonomic control plane on top of a network of practical interest. In this paper we propose a novel Knowledge Plane, tailored specifically for the WMNs scenario and capable of enabling consistent sharing of services ontology among the entities participating the WMNs. As a case study, we present JANUS, a novel and freely available monitoring framework exploiting the proposed Knowledge Plane