Modeling and Designing Resource Efficient Distributed MANET Management System (DMMS)

Abstract

Traditional network management systems use spoofing of resources to collect statistical data such as resource usage and performance. This data is exchanged with other resources through management protocols. The amount of data can be extremely high and the bandwidth for overhead management functions increases significantly. Also, the data storage requirements in each network resource for management functions increases and become inefficient as it increases the power usage for processing. In this paper, we propose a distributed network management system where each network resource maintains a set of Management Information Base (MIB) elements and stores resource activities in their abstraction in terms of counters, flag and threshold values. The abstract data is exchanged between different management agents residing in different resources on a need-to-know basis and each agent logically executes management functions locally to develop understanding of the behavior of all network resources to ensure that user protocols can function smoothly. Our proposed architecture can be implemented in any network, but is highly important to be considered in power and bandwidth constrained networks such as Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET). In this research, we use cross layer models to demonstrate simplified way of efficiently managing the overall performance of individual network resources (nodes) and the network itself which is critical for not only monitoring the traffic, but also dynamically controlling the end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) for multi-service applications.