An Open Architecture for Monitoring and Measuring QoS Indicators in Wireless Community Networks

Wireless community networks (WCNs) are wide-area wireless networks whose nodes are owned and managed by volunteers. These networks are rarely supported by any infrastructure for measuring network performance indicators. In this paper, we present the design, the implementation and the experimental evaluation of KIXEM, an open agent-based architecture, whose design meets the special requirements and characteristics of WCNs. The proposed architecture is designed to passively monitor multiple wireless routing nodes within a WCN, in order to extract flow based network measurements. KIXEM is evaluated on a simulated WCN, representing part of the Athens wireless metropolitan network.