Fostering the simulation-based evaluation of management architectures over multi-hop topologies

This paper discusses a simulation based approach to evaluate legacy management frameworks over new personal networking architectures. After implementing a real demonstrator, gathering a broad range of devices, technologies, and services supported by this type of environments, we were able to assess the feasibility of a hierarchical management framework, validating its correct behavior. However, we realized that this demonstrator does not allow carrying out a thorough and systematic evaluation of more complex scenarios, mimicking potential real environments, especially in terms of network dimensions and mobility restrictions. Hence, we propose to extend the analysis performed over the real platform by means of the Network Simulator framework. Finally we obtain preliminary measurements to validate the approach, which aims at being the starting point to address management modeling and evaluation over multi-hop networks.