Optimal latency balancing algorithm for multiple portal in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are the key technology of wireless access network for wireless Internet application. WMNs exploit mesh gateways for delivering traffic to or from the end-users with a multihop wireless backbone. Because the traffic volume is expected too high for single mesh gateway, the adoption of multiple mesh gateways is very essential. Hence, a traffic balancing algorithm becomes vital to be incorporated into the routing protocol that used in the WMNs. In this paper, we propose an optimal latency balancing (OLB) algorithm, which is used to balance the traffic load among the mesh gateways and to improve the latency of packet sending. The proposed OLB algorithm effectively finds the potential traffic flows to be switchable until the inter-domain traffic volume is balanced. Simulation results reveal that the performance of routing protocol with the proposed OLB algorithm is improved in terms of latency, hop count, network throughput, and packet delivery ratio.