LOAD BALANCING IN WIRELESS MESH NETWORKS

Abstract

In a wireless mesh network (WMN), load balancing is critical to utilize the network capacity efficiently. The effects of unbalanced load include gateway loading, center loading, and bottleneck node formation. The gateway nodes connect the WMN to the external Internet. The traffic aggregation at the gateway nodes creates load imbalance at certain gateways which in turn results in congestion, packet loss, and buffer overflow, at the gateway nodes. In addition, the gateway's backhaul connection to the external network may be bandwidth constrained. Hence, load balancing across gateways in a WMN is critical for improving the bandwidth utilization and network scalability.