Distributed Decision Engine - An Information Management Architecture for Autonomic Wireless Networking

With wireless networks becoming ever more ubiquitous and the capabilities of the devices connected to them rivalling those of desktop computers, there is an acute need for the communications in these networks to be managed as efficiently and autonomously as possible. Moreover, as the number of connected devices is rapidly increasing, the problem is becoming all the more complex and the amount of up-to-date status information needed for the management is multiplying. In order to meet the needs of future network management in terms of knowledge building and dissemination, this paper presents an architecture for collecting, processing, and disseminating vast amounts of network management information efficiently in wireless networks. The information may originate from the different layers of the networking protocol stack either on the wireless clients or network devices, and the architecture facilitates its signalling within a distributed network management system. Also, as described in this paper with practical examples, the architecture has been validated in a laboratory with real devices in the context of multiple use cases ranging from enhanced multimedia delivery for mobile clients to balancing the workload of network nodes. In addition, this paper evaluates the performance of the Event Cache prototype in terms of its capability of handling event dissemination in a real testbed environment.