APTLB: A Practical Approach for Providing Traffic Load-Balancing in Wireless Mesh Networks

As a result of the nature of routing algorithm in a wireless mesh networks (WMNs), and although there is more than one hotspot access point (HSAP) in a WMN, the traffic load of each HSAP is quite different. A HSAP may be very busy during a particular period while the others are in very light loads, in consequence, of the inherent characteristic of routing algorithm of WMN. A traffic load concentrates on a HSAP may lead to network congestion, increase the packet loss rate and degrade the performance of network. Therefore, it is very necessary to provide a mechanism to guide part of a traffic load from busy HSAPs to light load HSAPs to balance the traffic load between all HSAPs. In this paper, a practical approach for providing traffic load-balancing (APTLB) mechanism is proposed to solve this problem. APTLB composed of two mechanisms schemes: the traffic load detection scheme (TLD) to discover the heavy load nodes through traffic load detection Scheme, and traffic load balancing scheme (TLB) to guide part of traffic from heavy loaded to light traffic loaded node. The simulation results indicate that the traffic balancing mechanism can enhance the performance of WMN.