Load balancing routing for path length and overhead controlling in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) provide ubiquitous Internet access for mobile users by integrating wired and wireless networks. As gateways towards wired networks are potential bottlenecks, load balancing routing plays a central role in the performance of WMN. With regard to this matter, a number of load balancing routing heuristics have been proposed. However, none of them tackles four key aspects of the load balancing routing problem at the same time, which are achieving low computational costs, and reducing the average path length and routing overhead, while distributing the flows uniformly. To fill this gap, the aim of this paper is to introduce a new load balancing routing heuristic, called BPR - Bottleneck, Path length and Routing overhead, which offers an efficient online solution by taking into consideration all these aspects of the load balancing routing problem. We have carried out a simulation study to compare the performance of BPR with a recent related work. BPR obtains bottleneck values within desirable bounds, while reducing the average path length. As a result, BPR also notably reduces the number of route updates in the network, i.e. the routing overhead. Finally, we show that BPR is simple and has low demand for processing requirements.