Gateways and performance of WMN

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is emerging as key technology for the next generation network due to its features like providing broadband access with low cost and applicability to versatile areas. WMN´s are basically multi-hop networks, in which data is forwarded to backbone through a gateway from the client nodes and vice versa. The client nodes may be wired or wireless and may be mobile with varying client network architecture. Gateway has fixed bandwidth to be shared by all the clients for communication. It causes reduction in per client throughput as the number of clients is increasing and thus may lead to overall performance degradation. Associating clients to gateway is a crucial point in deciding performance as is gateway placement, routing and scheduling at the gateway. Associating nodes to a single nearest gateway causes reduction in capacity of WMN and unfairness amongst the nodes. Clients can be associated to multiple gateways. WMN are dynamically self-organizing and self-healing and this imposes even more responsibility on gateways. Having multiple gateways in clustered WMN can improve performance significantly.