Gateway-Level Load Balancing Techniques for WMN: A Comparative Study

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a key technology for next-generation wireless networking, because of their advantages over other wireless networks. Due to the ever growing structure of WMN the traffic volume is expected to be very high, thus load balancing becomes a crucial part of it. Network load balancing enhances the scalability and availability of network. Load balancing can be used to extend the lifetime of a Mesh Network. Various approaches have been proposed by various researchers for load balancing between Internet Gateways (IGWs) and thus reducing the traffic congestion and improving the network performance and providing a better quality of service (QoS). This paper presents a detailed investigation on various Gateway level load balancing techniques for WMNs that have been proposed so far along with the critical comments as to which approach is better and suitable in which condition.