Including Adaptive Behavior in a Wireless Network System

Interest in wireless networks has increased dramatically in the last few years. In contrast to wired networks, however, wireless networks need to be managed more elaborately. In many cases, it is very useful to have a middleware that takes control over the connection management, fault management, and communication management. Most current approaches concentrate on a subset of topics to be determined in this context. This chapter will take a closer look at the BlueSpot System [5], which is a project that develops an adaptive middleware to handle a complete wireless network management system. The middleware is used to control wireless Mesh- Net infrastructures. There are mobile services on top of the middleware, which are implemented in either native C code or as Java MIDlets. The middleware itself is available for different operating systems, like Linux, Symbian OS, or Windows Mobile, and thus for various devices such as Smartphones or PDAs. Constructed in this manner, the BlueSpot System is used to demonstrate today’s existing wireless network management mechanisms and to compare these mechanisms with one another. Additionally, because of the well-defined interfaces the middleware provides, it is very easy to integrate new concepts and to gain benchmarking results that are comparable to existing ones before applying the BlueSpot System. The middleware is built up modularly, so that parts of it can be extended or exchanged very easily.