Design and simulation of load balancing algorithms in wireless mesh network

Abstract

This work deals with balancing the load which is caused due to the congestion created in Wireless Mesh Network. It is known that each Mesh Router is associated with a gateway for transmission and reception of internet traffic. So, if a lot of Mesh Routers are served by a single gateway from the gateway set, the gateway becomes congested. This deteriorates the overall performance of the network. Many algorithms for load balancing have been introduced to solve this problem. In this paper, a hop count based load balancing algorithm and a Last in first out based load balancing algorithm have been proposed to balance the load in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) having multiple gateways. The algorithms in the proposed scheme are executed when the network is found to be overloaded. The proposed schemes reroutes the flow of the mesh router from the overloaded domain by taking care that the flow of the rest of the mesh routers in the overloaded domain should not be hampered. The proposed schemes are compared with each other and have been simulated. The simulation results show that the hop count based load balancing algorithm balances the load more efficiently than Last in first out based load balancing algorithm.