Towards self-managed quality-of-service aware wireless mesh networks

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As networks continue to grow in size, technology-sophistication and geographical-reach, their management is becoming a major bottleneck in accommodating newer non-traditional, real-time, and mission-critical applications, even to the most experienced administrators. To address this problem, the long-term objective of the applicant's proposal is to bring the concepts of self-management to existing and emerging species of networks to create multi-technology networks with extremely large coverage, high-speeds, reliable quality-of-service (QoS), while keeping human supervision at minimal levels. Such a long-term prospect is achievable through identifying immediate problems that have both theoretical and practical significance. Following this methodology, the applicant's short-term activities will focus on the recently introduced technology of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs).These activities will be formulated as three main research problems. The first problem addresses the development of schemes to automate the construction of quasi-static topologies with maximum capacity. Two main approaches will be investigated to address this problem namely, graph coloring and multi-player quantum gaming theories. The second problem relates to how to dynamically allocate calculated WMN capacity efficiently and dynamically among a collection of classes of services, each endowed with a set of QoS requirements. To achieve self-managment of resource allocation, the solution will take inspiration from mechanisms in ecosystems. Finally, the third problem targets the assurance of fairness through the control of the cooperative behavior among nodes. While in other infrastructure-based networks, a centralized management entity controls the behavior of nodes to ensure fairness among users, this approach is not feasible in WMNs. Hence, a self-policing mechanism must be developed to ensure the cooperative behavior in making management decisions (e.g., resource allocation).