Context management system for pervasive WMN

Abstract

Conventional layered protocols are not capable to handle the vagaries of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) such as rapidly changing wireless channel quality, battery power and network topology. Most WMN cross-layer proposals to overcome these problems utilize only a limited set of parameters from the concerned layers rendering them incapable of network and system wide optimizations as they do not consider global network context. Additionally, their application is limited by the use-case and deployment scenarios as well as technologies considered and can also lead to destructive interaction due to the lack of a global view and also the lack of communication between the numerous cross-layer adaptations. To make WMNs truly pervasive, there is an urgent need to make the WMN protocol stack context-aware, so that it can adapt dynamically to the deployment scenarios and operating conditions. Early designs for global network context management for WMN do not reflect WMN limitations such as scarce network capacity and CPU and RAM constraints of mobile devices. Most also do not consider higher-level context and situation reasoning models and lack a simplified way of representing, managing and gathering context information. Some of the current proposals utilize generic context gathering concepts from Distributed Systems that could lead to excessively high communication overhead in WMN. This paper presents the requirements for developing a Middleware for managing WMN protocol and network context, evaluates the state of the art and proposes a concrete, extensible, lightweight and comprehensive context management system for WMN named MESH-CMS which can overcome the aforementioned problems.