Greedy Local Routing Strategy for Autonomous Global Load Balancing Based on Three-Dimensional Potential Field

Abstract

We discuss a traffic load balancing scheme for three-dimensional (3D) wireless mesh networks (WMNs), which deals with global load balancing through only one-hop local information. With a finite element method (FEM), we derive a distributed form of a solution for 3D Poisson's equation to construct a routing metric sensitive to traffic loads. For practical validation, we implement it on an IEEE 802.11-based WMN testbed platform. Experiment results show that our protocol chooses routing paths more efficiently for network-wide load balancing than a state-of-the-art routing protocol, OLSR-ETX.