Autonomous Load Balancing by Multipath Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks have attracted attention as a technology that is fault tolerant and can easily be extended to wireless LAN areas. We try to connect to the Internet using battery powered wireless mesh networks during disasters. Reducing power consumption is important in battery powered wireless mesh networks as same as in wireless sensor networks. The main purpose of our research was increasing the lifetime in battery powered wireless mesh networks. We introduced multipath routing to avoid bottlenecks to achieve that purpose. Access points that were composed of wireless mesh networks autonomously selected a low load path from prepared paths and used a selected path for data transmission. As a result, our method distributed load and increased battery lifetimes. We found that autonomous path selection increased lifetimes in battery powered wireless mesh networks.