An Efficient Load Balancing Scheme for Multi-Gateways in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

In Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), we usually deploy multiple Internet Gateways (IGWs) to improve the capacity of WMNs. As most of the traffic is oriented towards the Internet and may not be distributed evenly among different IGWs, some IGWs may suffer from bottleneck problem. To solve the IGW bottleneck problem, we propose an efficient scheme to balance the load among different IGWs within a WMN. Our proposed load-balancing scheme consists of two parts: a traffic load calculation module and a traffic load migration algorithm. The IGW can judge whether the congestion has occurred or will occur by using a linear smoothing forecasting method. When the IGW detects that the congestion has occurred or will occur, it will firstly select another available IGW that has the lightest traffic load as the secondary IGW and then inform some mesh routers (MPs) which have been selected by using the Knapsack Algorithm to change to the secondary IGW. The MPs can return to their primary IGW by using a regression algorithm. Our Qualnet 5.0 experiment results show that our proposed scheme gives up to 18% end-to-end delay improvement compared with the existing schemes.