Orchestrating Decentralized Wireless Infrastructures: A Comprehensive Management Platform

Abstract

Community-driven wireless networks have emerged as a viable alternative to traditional Internet service provision, yet their organic growth and volunteer-operated nature introduce significant management complexities that impede scalability and operational efficiency. This paper presents a comprehensive management platform specifically designed to address the unique challenges of grassroots wireless infrastructures through a modular and extensible architecture. The platform integrates three core capabilities: an extensible configuration schema that enables platform-independent device description, an automated firmware generation pipeline that produces device-specific images using containerized build environments, and a continuous monitoring system that collects and analyzes telemetry data through a modular stream-processing architecture. By abstracting hardware-specific details and providing context-sensitive defaults, the platform significantly reduces the technical expertise required for network administration while eliminating manual configuration errors. The system's modular design allows individual communities to tailor functionality to their specific operational requirements without compromising the core management framework. Deployed in the WLAN Slovenija community network since 2015, the platform manages over 400 online nodes across diverse hardware platforms. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that the system reduces the time required to support new hardware from days to hours while enabling interactive, long-term data analysis previously unavailable in community network management. The platform's adoption by multiple community networks validates its effectiveness as a sustainable foundation for the continued growth of decentralized wireless infrastructures.