Routing with Congestion Control and Load Balancing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh network (WMN) is a special case of mobile ad hoc network where the nodes have relative fixed positions and communicate to the Internet through one or more gateways. Though traditional ad hoc routing algorithms, such as DSR etc., can be used in WMN, their performance is typically less than the ideal. The problem is that the assumptions provided in those algorithms that consider traffic originated between arbitrary pairs of nodes are not well applied for WMN, especially the aggregated traffic characteristic of WMN, and the traditional algorithms under those assumptions may cause severe network congestions. To efficiently control congestions and balance the traffic loads, we propose a novel adaptive QoS-aware routing algorithm using cross-layer design method. Simulation results demonstrate that the network loads balancing performance, such as packet delivery ratio or average throughput is better than that in the traditional DSR algorithm