Gateways congestion-aware design of multi-radio Wireless Networks

Abstract

In Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), traffic is mainly routed by WMN Backbone (WMNB) between the mesh clients and the Internet and goes through mesh gateways. Since almost all traffic has to pass through one of the MGs, the network may be unexpectedly congested at one or more of them, even if every mesh router provides enough throughput capacity. In this paper, we address the problem of congestion of gateways while designing WMNs. We propose a simultaneous optimization of three competing objectives, namely network deployment cost, interference between network channels and congestion of gateways while guaranteeing full coverage for mesh clients. We tailor a nature inspired meta-heuristic algorithm to solve the model whereby, several trade-off solutions are provided to the network planner to choose from. A comparative experimental study with different key parameter settings is conducted to evaluate the performance of the model. © Institute for Computer Science, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2009.