Autonomous load balancing field-based anycast routing protocol for wireless mesh networks

Abstract

A wireless mesh network (WMN) is expected to be a key enabler for next generation networking due to its infrastructure-less strengths such as scalability, cost-efficient rapid deployment, and long distance communications. In a WMN, in its nature, a mesh node cooperates to forward a packet to a destination with each other. In this process, traffic concentrates on a specific region, and forms a congested hot spot which increases channel access contention and queueing delays. Thus, path load balancing is essential for improving the performance of a WMN. Compared with a wired network, the scalability of a WMN is more challengeable due to the unstable nature of wireless links including interference and fading. Conventional shortest-path routing, which requires the route maintenance process, is vulnerable to congested hot spots and node failures. Because control messages consume the available bandwidth for data traffic, network throughput decreases. In this sense, a protocol design of a WMN is required to cover scalable distributed networking with minimum control overheads. A WMN is a hub-and-spoke type network, where mesh gateways as hubs play a role to provide Internet access. The majority of traffic in a WMN is from mesh clients to mesh gateways or vice versa. As a result, the throughput capacity of an entire WMN totally depends on the utilization efficiency of mesh gateways. To maximize the throughput efficiency in a WMN, load balancing among mesh gateways is a primary issue. As a load balancing routing scheme, back-pressure routing is well-known. Back-pressure routing utilizes queue length information for routing decisions, but no consideration of path length causes unnecessary long paths which involve frequent channel access contention and queueing delays. On the other hand, geographic routing fully exploits scalable distributed networking. Because there is no route maintenance, geographic routing with few control overheads minimizes the consumption of wirele...