Efficient Multiple Gateways Load-Balancing and QoS Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are an emerging architecture for multi-hop transmission where the nodes have relative fixed positions and communicate to the Internet through one or more gateways. Our goal is to maximize the network utilization by balancing the traffic load, while providing fair service and QoS guarantees to the users. In this paper, we provide an efficient method that elegantly balances the load among the different IGWs under high traffic loads in a backbone network. Moreover, our method significantly reduces the computation complexity and is capable of providing solution to practical problems. The proposed load balancing scheme includes: an initial gateway discovery module, which determines a primary gateway for a mobile node and a load balancing module that rebalances the load among the gateways. Our experiment-based study shows that our scheme offers a reliable and efficient support for QoS applications and we observe that the proposed scheme is able to balance the traffic efficiently. It can be able to well satisfy the transmissions need of a variety of traffic including video applications in WMNs.