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.