Manager Selection over a Hierarchical/Distributed Management Architecture for Personal Networks

Abstract

In spite of having been the focus of several works, traditional management architectures, usually based on a centralized model, are not suitable for the particular characteristics of personal networks and their underlying multi-hop topologies. A hierarchical/distributed approach is proposed in this work, which also analyzes different strategies to optimally select the nodes taking the manager role. In order to assess the benefits and drawbacks of these mechanisms, a proprietary simulator was developed, and different metrics were studied (probability for a node to take part on the management architecture, number of hops needed to reach a manager, and fairness of the distribution of the management burden). A novel heuristic is proposed to enhance one of the analyzed strategies, and it is shown to outperform the rest of algorithms.