FRONT-END FOR MONITORING MESH NETWORK By Lesetsa Mojapelo A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Honours in Computer Science The University of the Western Cape 2013 Date: April 8, 2013
The University of the Western Cape Abstract FRONT-END FOR MONITORING MESH NETWORK By Lesetsa Alpheus Mojapelo Supervisor: Co-Supervisor: Professor W.D. Tucker Mr. N. Norman Department of Computer Science This paper reports on the user requirements and requirement analysis of a mesh network visualization tool. It proposes an interactive tool for monitoring mesh network. The proposed tool would make use of a database backed data source and would be web-based system. Link quality differs quite often in a wireless mesh network; therefore the tool dynamically displays the quality of each link. The usage of this tool is very important for mesh network monitoring and also makes maintenance procedures and network problem solution much easier.
ABSTRACT LIST OF FIGURES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS GLOSSARY Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 1 USER Requirements Document (URD) 2 2.1 OVERVIEW 2 2.2 USER S VIEW OF THE PROBLEM 2 2.3 WHAT IS EXPECTED FROM A SOFTWARE SOLUTION? 2 2.4 WHAT IS NOT EXPECTED FROM A SOFTWARE SOLUTION? 3 2.5 SYSTEM USERS 3 Requirement analysis document (RAD) 4 3.1 OVERVIEW 4 3.2 DESIGNER S INTERPRETATION OF THE USER S REQUIREMENT 4 3.3 VISUALIZATION 5 3.4 INTERACTIVE USER CAPABILITIES 5 3.5 AUTHORIZATION 5 3.6 RELATED WORK 5 3.7 TOOLS TO BE USED 6 3.8 TESTING THE SYSTEM 6 BIBLIOGRAPHY 7 I iii iv v ii
LIST OF FIGURES Figure1. Overview of the solution 4 iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the all mighty God for His sufficient grace over my life. iv
GLOSSARY RAD - Requirement Analysis Document URD - User Requirements Document API - Application Programming Interface HTML - Hyper Text Mark-up Language CSS - Cascading Style Sheet v
C h a p t e r 1 INTRODUCTION Lately, mesh networks have been drawing much attention from service providers and network operators, because of their ability to extend the coverage of public hot-spot, large-scale urban areas and can save the cost of maintenance, deployment and cabling. The penetration of telecommunication in rural areas is very low and non-existent in some areas. Yet, the key to social and economic development in rural areas is been identified as being affordable, reliable and easy access to telecommunication services for everyone. Lot of work has been done by researchers on the ways to increase the penetration of telecommunication services in rural areas, where the mesh network technology was one of the solutions to improve the delivery of telecommunication services to rural communities, because mesh networks are characterized by being easy to deploy, low cost and fault tolerant. To that response there have been a lot of mesh network development projects and research projects going on around the world, which were based at rural regions. A wireless mesh network comprises of mesh nodes which are the backbone of the network. To maintain the mesh connectivity the nodes are able to automatically configure and re-configure dynamically. This gives mesh the characteristics of being self-forming and self-healing. Yet beside having those characteristics, monitoring and maintaining mesh networks is a very complex task. Network manager have to spend too much time analyzing the collected network data, and that is done manually in order to carry out the monitoring task. The work of analyzing network data is very complex, difficult task that will require someone with experience, knowledge of networking and behavior and system protocol, and intensive knowledge of the operating environments []. This becomes a problem as most of the people in the rural areas are unskilled, and it will be very difficult for such people to perform easy the monitoring tasks. This is one of the aims for this project, is to make a system that will make the monitoring task very easy, by visualizing the network.
Chapter 2 2.1 Overview USER Requirements Document (URD) Determining the user requirements is one of the important and difficult steps of designing a software product. In this chapter we discuss and present the user requirement for the proposed tool, showing what is expected and not expected from the software. 2.2 User s view of the problem Managing or monitoring mesh network is very complex. Network managers or network administrators have to spend too much time analyzing the data or information collected from different nodes, links, and routes, in order to carry out monitoring tasks, like to diagnose active problems or identifying forthcoming problems, and that has to be done manually which is time-consuming. As it is very complex to do the analysis of the information collected, it required someone with intensive networking skills. So with this front end in place, the complexity of monitoring a mesh network could be severely reduced and so allowing people with less networking skills, as those that normally going to manage mesh networks in rural areas, to carry out monitoring task. 2.3 What is expected from a software solution? The software solution is expected to provide a dashboard where the information from different nodes, links, and routes, contained in the parameters collected, can be easily visualized. It also should provide means to set up alerts if values go over a certain threshold. Specific requirements: Show the location of the nodes over the map Show the active wireless links between the nodes and link quality in each direction Provide an interactive interface, where user can be able to click on a specific node or link and have access to more information about it. 2
2.4 What is not expected from a software solution? The software solution is not expected to do the monitoring automatically on the network. It will only be used to do the visualization of the network to ease the monitoring and maintenance of mesh network. 2.5 System Users The main users for this system will be the network managers or simply network administrators, who are responsible for the monitoring and maintenance of the network. 3
C h a p t e r 3 3.1 Overview Requirement analysis document (RAD) Requirement analysis is very important to the success of any software project development. We discussed and presented the user requirements in the previous chapter. In this chapter the requirement analysis will be presented and discussed. 3.2 Designer s interpretation of the user s requirement In the previous chapter (chapter1) we have clearly stated the user requirements for the software solution. Now we going to look at the technical requirement needed to implement the given user requirement. The front end will make use of the database data source, which is the responsibility of the back-end to collect and store the data needed to be used. Therefore we are going to assume that the collected data is already stored in the database. The front end will provide the dashboard to visualize the data stored in the database. The following figure illustrates the overview of the system. Web-browser Database Visualized data Figure1. Overview of the solution The user interface is going to be interactive web-based. The front-end need to provide the network manager with enough information to be able to make snap decisions, whether or not something need to be done or investigated further. Should be as simple as possible that by one glance you can be able to see what is happening on the network. It will show the network topology map and the overview of the link between the nodes. Link quality is one of the main things we going to be monitoring. In the wireless mesh network the link quality differs quite often, so the link quality is going to be shown in different directions. 4
3.3 Visualization Several visualization techniques are going to be used. We are going to use the Google map JavaScript API v3 to visualize the network topology map. This will make it possible to visualize the location of the nodes or geographical positions of the nodes. Several map icons are going be used to represent various network entities such as mesh node, mesh gateway and route. As the link quality differs, we going to represent it using different colors showing the strength of the link. 3.4 Interactive user capabilities The user will be able to interact with the system. The user will be able to click on a specific node or link and get more information about it. For example, when clicking on a link, the link quality values in both directions will be shown. The user will also be able to get more information about the network. 3.5 Authorization In this approach, each user will receive a unique password and username. The list of the users then will be stored on an existing database, which will be on the central server. Therefore users will have to provide their login credentials to access the system. 3.6 Related work In the last decades, there have been a lot of mesh network research projects and development projects going on around the world [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11]. Most of them have developed their own network visualization tools for monitoring mesh network. We are going to mention some of them and what tool they have developed. And also discuss on the capabilities and the problems. They are as follows; Google WiFi in Mountain View [5], Meraki [4], Afrimesh [], Roofnet [10] and lot more. Google developed a mesh visualization map which was a very good tool, but it only shows the network coverage area [5]. Roofnet [10] developed a better solution than Google visualization map. 5
The tool shows link quality between the wireless routers, and most importantly, it has a real time link map. The problem with the tool was it does not provide the user interactivity. The ReMesh project initially developed a very useful tool for monitoring live network. They used dotdraw to develop a network map. It was very hard to visually understand the data presented by the tool, which was the main problem with it. Lately came the Afrimesh project, which was founded by Antoine van Gelder, assisted by the Meraka institute at CSIR. They developed a very powerful system described as a simplified dashboard for network management and configurations [7]. 3.7 Tools to be used 1. Html - for development of web interface 2. CSS - also for development of web interface 3. JavaScript - also for development of web interface 4. Jquery - for development of web interface 5. Php for server side 6. Google maps JavaScript API v3 3.8 Testing the system The system will be first tested on the exiting mesh network that is available in the computer science department. 6
BIBLIOGRAPHY [1] ReMesh, Mesh Network Workgroup, available at http://mesh.ic.uff.br., 2013 [2] UCSB MeshNet, http://moment.cs.ucsb.edu/meshnet, 2013. [3] VMesh, http://vmesh.inf.uth.gr/, 2013. [4] Meraki, http://meraki.com/, 2013. [5] Google WiFi Mountain View, http://wifi.google.com, 2013. [6] NetEquality, http://www.netequality.com, 2013 [7] D. Couto, D. Aguayo, J. Bicket and R. Morris, A High-Throughput Path Metric for Multi-Hop Wireless Routing, ACM MobiCom, San Diego, CA, September 2003. [8] N. Tsarmpopoulos, I. Kalavros, S. Lalis. A Low-Cost and Simple-to- Deploy Peer-to-Peer Wireless Network based on Open Source Linux Routers, In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks and Communities (TRIDENTCOM 05), 2005. [9] Ho, K. Ramachandran, K.C. Almeroth and E.M. Belding-Royer, A Scalable Framework for Wireless Network Monitoring, 2nd ACM International Workshop on Wireless Mobile Applications and Services On WLAN Hotspots (WMASH), Philadelphia, PA. Available at Http: //moment.cs.ucsb.edu/meshnet/., September 2004. [10] Roofnet, http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/roofnet/doku.php?id=map, 2013. [11] Afrimesh. Afrimesh. https://code.google.com/p/afrimesh/, 2013. 7
INDEX A After printing 1 J Junk iv 8