Stix: a goal-oriented distributed management system for large-scale broadband wireless access networks

Abstract

Stix is a platform managing emerging large-scale broadband wireless access (BWA) networks. It has been developed to make it easy to manage such networks for community deployments and wireless Internet service providers while keeping the network management infrastructure scalable and flexible. Stix is based on the notions of goal-oriented and in-network management. With Stix, administrators graphically specify network management activities as workflows, which are deployed at a distributed set of agents within the network that cooperate in executing those workflows and storing management information. We implement the Stix system on embedded boards and show that the implementation has a low memory footprint. Using real topology and logging data from a large-scale BWA network operator, we show that Stix is significantly more scalable (via reduction in management traffic) compared to the commonly employed centralized management approach. Finally we use two case studies to demonstrate the ease with which Stix platform can be used for carrying out network reconfiguration and performance management tasks, thereby also showing its potential as a flexible platform to realize self-management mechanisms.