Load-balanced Mesh Portal Selection in Wireless Mesh Network

As a component device of wireless mesh network (WMN), a mesh portal establishes a connection between non-802.11 network and WMN. Since all incoming and outgoing traffic goes through the mesh portal, it easily becomes bottleneck point. Although multiple mesh portals are available, uneven distribution of traffic causes congestion in some mesh portals and aggravates the network throughput. In this paper, we propose load-balanced mesh portal selection algorithm (LB-MPS) to achieve both even traffic distribution with low control overhead and performance improvement in WMN. We decrease load-balancing overhead by controlling a propagation area of periodic mesh portal advertisement messages not to spread whole network. Instead, mesh portals dynamically adjust intersection areas of propagation areas to unbalanced traffic load and the traffic load generated inside the intersections is distributed among mesh portals evenly. Simulation results show a significant improvement in load-balance and we reduce average control overhead less than 30% of legacy algorithms´.