Using Mobile Internet Gateways in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have recently received tremendous research attention in industry and academia. The application domain of WMN is expanding from experimental settings in academic research to practical implementations in community networking, public safety, transportation services, healthcare systems and other similar applications. While these applications are evolving, there are still key challenges in terms of network performance, flexibility and resource management. In this paper we study wireless mesh networks with mobile Internet gateways. We employ a multi-path routing scheme with a routing metric based on load balancing to reduce packet loss and delay. Unlike most existing multipath routing protocols, our approach supports the maintenance of parallel multiple paths. Simulation experiments are carried out to assess network performance in the presence of mobile gateways. Simulation results show that the use of mobile gateways with concurrent multipath routing can result in good performance at lower speed and multiple mobile gateways.