Design and Implementation of a Channel Load Aware Path and Gateway Selection Scheme in Multi-channel Multi-interface Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh network (WMN) forms a wireless backbone which extend the coverage area via multi-hop relay function. The performance of WMNs can be further boosted by employing multiple gateways. In this paper, we address the implementation issues for deploying WMN test bed with multiple gateways and propose a channel load aware airtime(CL_AIR) metric based path and gateway selection scheme to balance the load of gateway. We perform experiments on a real test bed to evaluate performance of the proposed scheme. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme enhances performance in terms of delay and throughput. The proposed scheme reduces average delay up to 90% and increases throughput up to 16% compared to the nearest gateway selection scheme.