A cross‐layer architecture for effective channel assignment with load‐balancing in multi‐radio multi‐path wireless mesh networks

Abstract

AbstractWireless mesh networks (WMNs) are a promising technology for providing Internet connectivity to large residential areas. In a typical WMN deployment, end‐users access the Internet through a backbone of static routers, which are responsible for traffic forwarding towards the closest Internet gateway (IG). In such a scenario, multiple paths may likely exist between the end‐users and the IGs. For this reason, multi‐path routing schemes appear as a viable approach to provide higher aggregate throughput, fault‐tolerance and load‐balancing properties. However, route‐coupling problems may occur when the paths are concurrently used and certain nodes on separate paths are within each other's interference range. To overcome this problem, we propose a cross‐layer architecture that comprises a novel joint multi‐path routing and channel allocation scheme for multi‐radio WMNs. The routing scheme discovers multiple node‐disjoint paths between a source node (i.e. the end‐user) and the gateway node. During the route setup, channel allocation is performed so that nodes on different paths, but within the same interference domain, transmit on different channels. As a result, the effect of route coupling is strongly mitigated. Moreover, we propose a load‐balancing scheme, which allows to distribute traffic among the available node‐ and channel‐disjoint paths. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme reduces the end‐to‐end delay and significantly enhances the system goodput over several network topologies and under different traffic workloads. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.