DAMON: a distributed architecture for monitoring multi-hop mobile networks

With the advent of small form-factor devices, protocol standardization, and robust protocol implementations, multi-hop mobile networks are witnessing widespread deployment. The monitoring of such networks is crucial for their robust operation. To this end, this paper presents DAMON, a distributed system for monitoring multi-hop mobile networks. DAMON uses agents within the network to monitor network behavior and send collected measurements to data repositories. DAMON's generic architecture supports the monitoring of a wide range of protocol, device, and network parameters. Other key features of DAMON include seamless support for multiple repositories, auto-discovery of sinks by the agents, and resiliency of agents to repository failures. We have implemented DAMON agents that collect statistics on data traffic and the ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol. We have used our implementation to monitor an ad hoc network at the 58th Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting held November 2003 in Minneapolis, MN. In this paper, we describe the architecture of DAMON and report on the performance of the IETF network using monitoring information collected by DAMON. Our network monitoring system is available online for use by other researchers.