JANUS: A Framework for Distributed Management of Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are emerging as a potentially attractive access architecture for metropolitan-scale networks. While research on WMNs has been up to a large extent confined to the study of efficient routing protocols, there is a clear need to envision new network management tools, able to sufficiently exploit the peculiarities of WMNs. In particular, a new generation of middleware tools for network monitoring and profiling must be introduced in order to speed up development and testing of novel protocol architectures. Currently, management functionalities are developed using conventional centralized approaches. The distributed and self-organizing nature of WMNs suggest a transition from network monitoring to network sensing. In this work, we propose JANUS, a novel framework for distributed monitoring of WMNs. We describe the JANUS architecture, present a possible implementation based on open-source software and report some experimental measurements carried out on a small-scale testbed.