Traffic balancing in wireless MESH networks

Several access points may be put into wireless ad hoc networks for people connecting to WWW or other Internet services. This kind of wireless network is called wireless mesh networks (WMNs) that still needs users to relay packets for other users. The meshed topology provides good reliability, market coverage, and scalability, as well as low upfront investment. However, due to the nature of routing algorithm the traffic load for a access point may be extremely heavy during particular periods while the other access points are in very light load. Consequently, the overall performance of the network are poor even the total traffic load is far below the system capacity. Traffic balancing proposed for wireless ad hoc networks provides an efficient solution to this problem. With right placement of the access points, the performance can be improved dramatically by traffic balancing.