A New Unicast Routing Algorithm for Load Balancing in Multi-Gateway Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Gateways are a very important element of wireless mesh networks.They provide the connection between the whole network and the outside world, including the Internet.Since all of input and output traffic in the network go through gateways, these points are simply prone to congestion.Despite having multiple gateways in the network, in the absence of load balancing in the network, some of these gateways are still in danger of congestion that causes traffic aggregation in gateways, and hence, degrading of network throughput.In this paper we propose a method named LBMGW for selecting appropriate gateways that aims load balancing in gateways and increasing network performance.LBMG is the measure for selecting a gateway which is a combination of measures such as negative percent hop, time, and internal load in each gateway.Furthermore, some conditions have been considered to prevent control overhead inside the network.GloMoSim has been used for simulations.Then the results are compared with other available methods that show improvement in throughput of wireless mesh networks with the proposed method.