Diffusion Based Distributed Internet Gateway Load Balancing in a Wireless Mesh Network

In a wireless mesh network (WMN), mesh clients (MCs) access the Internet through the wireless backbone formed by the Internet Gateways (IGWs) and Mesh Routers (MRs). An IGW as the traffic center may easily become the congestion center in a WMN. The load balancing between IGWs will reduce the traffic congestion thereby improving the network performance and providing a better quality of service (QoS). In this paper, potential load balancing between different IGW service domains is examined and fairness metrics are defined for both homogenous and heterogeneous WMNs. A distributed load balancing scheme based on diffusion methods is proposed to achieve a global load fairness. The effectiveness and efficiency of proposed load balancing scheme are verified by extensive simulations.