Ontological Configuration Management for Wireless Mesh Routers

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are a category of wireless networks that are self-organized, robust and which offer more flexible client coverage with less equipment requirements than wired networks. In WMNs, mesh routers constitute the network's "backbone". The distributed, ever-changing and ad-hoc nature of these networks poses new challenges in configuration management. In order to face them, we modelize the configuration and semantics of a preexisting mesh router using the CIM model and OWL ontology language and implementing XSLT transformations from the original configuration format to CIM/OWL and back. We thus represent it in a higher level of abstraction, an ontological representation that supports configuration semantic checking, policy enforcing and reasoning on the configuration of WMN nodes. We also use the capabilities of our AdCIM framework for persistence and the generation of web configuration interfaces.