Achieving Load Balancing in Wireless Mesh Networks Through Multiple Gateways

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are evolving to be the key technology of the future. As the WMNs are envisioned to provide high bandwidth broadband service to a large community of users, the Internet gateway (IGW) which acts as a central point of Internet attachment for the mesh routers, it is likely to be a potential bottleneck because of its limited wireless link capacity. We propose a novel technique that elegantly balances the load among the different IGWs in a WMN. We switch the point of attachment of an active source serviced gateway depending on the average queue length at the IGW. The proposed load balancing scheme includes: an initial gateway discovery module, which determines a primary gateway for a mesh router and a load balancing module that rebalances the load among the gateways. We use ns-2 for evaluating our proposed scheme and we observe that the proposed scheme is able to balance the traffic efficiently