Probabilistic load balancing in wireless mesh networks

In a wireless mesh network (WMN), mesh clients (MCs) access the Internet through the wireless backbone formed by the Mesh Routers (MRs) and Internet Gateways (IGWs). Internet Gateways are the traffic center in each IGW service domain thus may also become the congestion center. To improve the performance of a WMN, the load balancing between different IGW service domains is investigated. The load fairness between IGWs domains will improve the network performance and provides a better quality of service (QoS) for end users. In this paper, the fairness index is defined for both homogenous and heterogeneous WMNs. A probabilistic load balancing algorithm based on the simulated annealing method is proposed to get the global load fairness.