An integrated approach for reliability and dependability of Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are gaining popularity in many application areas because of their low cost and high flexibility. Technically, a WMN forms a distributed network-centric system which aims to provide communication services to the application layer, but has no built-in dependability provisions. To make the network dependable, many problems have to be solved on different layers. With this paper, we describe our ongoing work to provide an integrated solution to increase the dependability of WMNs. Our approach combines network coverage planning on the physical layer, bandwidth management on the link layer and live network monitoring to improve the reliability, availability and maintainability of a WMN. We provide fine-grained means to improve the predictability of the network components, thus making the WMN more dependable. In this paper, we present first results of our work, and describe how they are interleaved.