Domain load balancing routing for multi-gateway wireless mesh networks

As Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are typically used for Internet access, most traffic is routed through the gateways which connect WMN to the wired network. As a result, the gateways tend to get congested and balancing of the traffic load of gateways is critical. In this paper, we consider applications that require continuous provision of a certain bandwidth to a server located at the wired network. If a path that satisfies the bandwidth request cannot be found, the request will be rejected, so that load imbalance will result underutilization of the network capacity. We present a novel load balancing routing algorithm for maximizing the network utilization (i.e., accommodating service requests as many as possible) for multi-gateway WMNs. In the proposed scheme, a WMN is divided into domains. Each domain is served by one gateway, so that all traffic of a domain is served by the corresponding gateway. Our scheme determines routing to balance the traffic load among domains, and then performs load balancing routing within each domain. Simulation results show that in square grid topologies, our intra-domain routing achieves near optimal performance with about 70% less overhead than the existing schemes. Our inter-domain load balancing scheme outperforms the existing heuristics by up to 25% while achieving about 80% performance of the optimal solution.