A novel load balancing scheme for hybrid routing protocol in IEEE 802.11 mesh network

Hybrid wireless mesh protocol (HWMP) is the default routing protocol for interoperability in IEEE 802.11s draft standards. When tree-based topology is enabled, the mesh points (MPs) in the vicinity of the gateway suffer heavier loads than those distant from the gateway. This may form bandwidth bottlenecks to inter-mesh data flows. In this paper, we propose a novel load balancing scheme. In the scheme, we monitor traffic load of each MP and assign different congestion weights to those MPs according to their hops away from the gateway. Once congestion is detected, our scheme can quickly suspend the intra-mesh packet delivering on the MPs near the gateway to relieve the congestion. Finally, simulation results show that our scheme achieves a better performance than that of original HWMP.