The conveniences of wireless networking and lightweight handheld devices have led to a large-scale adoption of wireless technologies. Corporations, universities, hospitals, homes, and public places are deploying these networks at a remarkable rate. Wireless Network Management refers to use of software tools designed to enhance performance, reliability and security of wireless networks particularly by diagnosing, detecting and reducing sources of radio frequency interference.

On the other hand, wireless networks pose significant management challenges in the following ways. First, a wireless network is a complex system with many inter-dependent factors that affect its behavior. The factors include traffic flows, network topologies, network protocols, hardware, software, and most importantly, the interactions among them. The interactions among these factors are not well understood. Second, wireless interference has a profound impact on network performance. Due to its high variability and dependency on environmental conditions, how to effectively obtain and incorporate wireless interference into network management remains an open problem. Third, unlike wire line networks, which may use over-provisioning to reduce the impact of performance problems and network failures to a certain extent, over-provisioning in wireless networks is often not a solution. This is due to the limited wireless spectrum and the effects of wireless interference. As a result, wireless users experience various problems, such as lack of coverage, intermittent connectivity, poor performance and reliability. Network administrators lack tools to effectively configure, provision, diagnose, and optimize networks, so they often have to resort to manual trial-and-error.