DAMON: A Distributed Architecture for Monitoring Multi-hop Mobile Networks

Krishna N. Ramachandran, Elizabeth M. Belding-Royer, Kevin C. Almeroth
Department of Computer Science
University of California, Santa Barbara,
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
{krishna, ebelding, almeroth}@cs.ucsb.edu

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.