Load-Balancing Gateway Selection Method in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

In wireless multi-hop networks, when an end host would like to communicate with external wired hosts, data packets are to be transmitted at first to a gateway node which is connected to both a wireless multi-hop network and a wired network. When there are multiple candidate gateways to be connected, a wireless host should select one gateway as its own default gateway. One possible and simple way is minimum hop gateway selection policy. This minimum hop gateway selection may cause performance degradation in the case of imbalance of traffic distribution. In this paper, we propose a new gateway selection method where an end host selects the default gateway from the viewpoint of gateway load balancing. Wireless communication channel around the gateway is very important resource because all the external traffic goes through the gateway. So, gateway load in our proposed method takes account of not only traffic intensity at a gateway but also interference of wireless channel around a gateway. Our simulation results show that our proposed method brings improvement of gateway throughput performance.