Development of an open source network management & monitoring platform for wireless broadband service provider in rural areas

People in rural areas are less likely to obtain broadband Internet access due to a combination of economic disadvantage, technical difficulties, and lack of service providers. There is a great need to develop robust, low-cost and easy-to-maintain network management platform for Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISP) in rural areas. The goal of this project is to partner with a small local start-up WISP and relieves some serious management & security problems the company encountered by the provision of an open source network management & monitoring system as well as a robust core router. To achieve the goal, an internal test bed consisting of a Wireless Router Application Platform (WRAP) was setup in a lab environment. Various open-source network applications such as Nagios, Snort, MRTG and Open VPN were customized and integrated. Several business management applications were also developed, including Request Tracker System, MySQL-based customer database, and database-driven web application for management interface. All these systems integrated together will allow a network management team to diagnose and solve network connectivity and security issues accurately and promptly. The survey shows that the proposed solution significantly reduce the company´s operation cost and improve the customers´ satisfaction.