A Capacity-Aware and Multipath-Supported Traffic Control Framework in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) bring the convenience for daily access and infrastructure construction. To improve the throughput of WMN, more than one Internet gateway can be deployed to a WMN and the network throughput can be improved via well deployment of Internet gateways. Although the route redirection and the dynamic routing metrics can be used to improve the performance of WMNs, more available network bandwidth will be consumed for control message exchanging. In this paper, we proposed a capacity-aware and multipath supported traffic control framework in wireless mesh networks. The proposed traffic control framework can be used to dispatch the data traffic in multipath manner and improve the utilization of wireless links and forwarding latency. A multi-level queue framework is proposed to classify traffic and monitor capacity of the links and Internet gateways without any message exchanging. Our traffic control strategy consists of two phases to automatically adapt the utilization of the links and the Internet gateways. In the first phase, the incoming packets are dispatched to the lower level queues according to the capacity of Internet gateways. In the second phase, the packets are dispatched to the related links. Both of the phases are based on the local minimization of the forwarding latency. Therefore, the proposed architecture can control the forwarding latency with an approximate minimum delay time.