Adaptive monitoring for mobile networks in challenging environments

The increasing capabilities of mobile communication devices are changing the way people interconnect today. Similar trends in the communication technology domain are leading to the expectation that data and media are available everywhere and anytime. The consequence is an increasing load on communication networks. Such data requirements paired with environmental conditions such as mobility or node density increase the risk of network failure, especially in dynamic mobile networks that particularly rely on wireless communication. Consequently, monitoring is crucial in mobile networks to ensure reliable and efficient operations. Current monitoring mechanisms mostly rely on a static architecture and unveil problems to handle the changes of mobile networks, applications, and environmental conditions over time. In this chapter, an adaptive monitoring mechanism is presented to overcome these limitations. The mechanism exploits the connectivity and resource characteristics of mobile communication devices to (i) reconfigure the monitoring topology and (ii) adapt to changes of mobile networks and environmental conditions. Through evaluations we show that our proposed solution reduces the achieved relative monitoring error by a factor of six. It also represents a highly robust and reliable monitoring mechanism for these challenging environments.