Exploiting Context-Awareness for the Autonomic Management of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are characterized by a degree of dynamicity that can result in significant drawbacks regarding their useful deployment. The fact they are formed spontaneously, comprising possibly heterogeneous devices, hinders further their wide adoption. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a system that exploits context-awareness and couples it with policy-based management in order to enable the self-management of MANETs. The key idea is to support self-configuration by being adaptive to varying conditions modeled as context, with high-level management policies driving self-configuration towards particular goals. We propose the management of the MANET in a hierarchical but also distributed manner through a dynamically constructed set of manager nodes. We present and evaluate our work on context-awareness and context dissemination in MANETs through simulation and also by deploying the prototype system in our experimental MANET testbed for a proof-of-concept application scenario.