Mitigating Load Imbalance in Wireless Mesh Networks with Mixed Application Traffic Types

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have been widely deployed as a new communication paradigm that can provide innovative services for a community (neighborhood, campus, etc.). WMNs are capable to provide both delay-sensitive services such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and delay-insensitive services such as peer-to-peer file sharing. Network routing protocols in WMNs often employ the minimum-hops routing metric to provide Quality of Service (QoS) for the delay-sensitive traffic. However, this approach results in unbalanced traffic load at network mesh routers. In this paper, we propose the WMNBalance: a content lookup algorithm for peer-to-peer file sharing over wireless mesh networks. The WMN-Balance enhances the content lookup routing on the overlay network, that involves mesh routers which support peer-to-peer file sharing, to mitigate the network unbalanced load.