University of Houston

Multi hop static wireless networks seem to be emerging as an inexpensive solution for extending Internet access in both urban communities and rural areas. Although many recent studies have emphasized the need for self management of these networks, there still exists a need to provide centralized control which can complement this and provide the network administrator a supervision point which makes troubleshooting and collecting statistics from these nodes easy. Managing wireless mesh networks has its own unique requirements of functioning despite network layer failure and routing the management traffic from a central manager towards destination nodes and back. We focus here to provide a distributed solution which combines the concepts of source routing, hierarchical addressing and adoption protocol. It aims to meet the design needs of management in wireless mesh networks – low overhead, agnostic of network layer, and exploits the broadcast nature of wireless medium and the direction of management traffic flow. Based on this routing infrastructure we suggest ways to query for information and retrieve responses from remote nodes. We compare our design with traditional technologies like SNMP which runs over TCP/IP in terms of response time and consumption of network bandwidth.