Arquitectura de gestión distribuida para redes malladas inalámbricas: aplicación en el entorno de la red personal

Abstract

This PhD proposes a management architecture based on a centralized/hierarchical organizational model, with three levels, that was tailored to suit a new generation personal networks architecture, which fosters novel concepts such as the Community Area Network (CAN), where the personal environments share services and resources within a distributed environment. This management architecture is implemented and validated over a testbed that was one of the outcomes of the PACWOMAN European project. The implementation of this testbed was the starting point of a new research line, which theoretically characterizes multi-hop networks, so as to improve the proposed management architecture, evolving it towards a distributed and hierarchical model. In order to so, we study different multi-hop network deployments, analyzing various strategies to assign the agent/manager roles amongst the nodes. After identifying a number of figures of merit, we identify which of the manager assignment strategies provides the most appropriate behaviour; the results yield that the sub-optimum topology-aware strategy was the one offering the best performance. In a following phase, we carry out a complete development of the management architecture within the framework of the NS-2 simulator, composed by both the management and discovery modules. The first one includes the agent/manager functionalities, while the second one implements the discovery protocol with two operation modes (proactive and reactive). The implementation is used to study (exploiting the possibilities brought about by simulation techniques) different network topologies, assessing the performance of the manager assignment strategies as well as the behaviour of the discovery protocols. Finally, we study two services that are complementary to the management architecture; the first one is a polling scheme with two strategies (distributed and centralized); on the other hand, we also analyze a scenario where the agents generate traffic to external networks, and they exploit the manager nodes as gateway entities that enable such communication.