A Hybrid Adaptive Traffic Control Strategy in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) has been attracted significant attention due to achieve a wide-area wireless environment with flexible-configuration and low-cost properties. When WMNs is used as an infrastructure for Internet access, all network traffic from mesh routers will be forwarded to the gateways that are directly connected to the wired network. Communication in large-scale wireless networks may suffer capacity bottlenecks in the gateway and local congestions among the mesh routers. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a hybrid strategy which combines the gateway-based and path-based traffic control schemes. In order to obtain simple and efficient results, the k-level congestion awareness scheme is proposed which uses the fuzzy logic technique to estimate the gateway loading. The border nodes (BNs) will redirect partial traffic to adjacent regions that belong to neighbor gateways if congestion occurs. Therefore, the proposed scheme can adjust the network traffic automatically according to traffic condition that can smoothly and immediately share traffic load to neighbor gateways. The validity of the model has been demonstrated through simulation experiments. Our simulation results have also indicated that our scheme is a good choice for WMNs to support efficient congestion control, especially in bursty traffic environments.