Research On Load Balancing Routing Metric In Wireless Mesh Networks

The rapid development of the wireless mobile communication technologies has broughtbig changes on people’s production and life. Wireless mesh networks have been widely useddue to the advantages of self-organizing, high-speed, high-capacity, and stable performance. Wireless mesh networks are considered to be potential technologies for constructing nextgeneration wireless communication networks.In WMN, the suddenness of the network traffic is the important factor that affectswireless network capacity. Reasonable planning of network traffic has an important effect onthe network overall performance and service quality. Network traffic imbalance is easy tocause the network nodes carrying heavy load, lead to packet loss, and reduce the networkperformance. Recently, many scholars research on the problem of network traffic imbalance:such as the gateway deployment algorithm and the gateway selection algorithm for thegateway node load balancing; or design routing metrics by getting the network loadinformation on the node and link. These methods can achieve the goal of network loadbalancing. However, routing metric which has the function of load aware can moreeffectively use resources to balance the network load distribution. So routing metric withload aware function has important theoretical significance and application value to improvethe network overall performance.By summarizing and analyzing routing metrics, we can find that existing routingmetrics did not consider the network load factors or measure the network load factorsinaccurately. This paper firstly analyzes INX(Interferer Neighbors Count) routing metric,and proposes regional load aware method to improve INX routing metric. Then on the basisof the above research, under the multi-gateway WMN environment, this paper designs a loadbalancing routing metric in multi-gateway wireless mesh networks, which considers thefactors such as network characteristics and isotonicity.On the basis of analyzing the advantages of INX considering data flow interference andthe defect of INX applying to the network environment with high load, this paper proposesthe interference and regional load aware (IRLA) routing metric which considers the loadfactors of the communication link and its interference range. IRLA uses the average degreeof competition to describe interference link load intensity and degree of dispersion. IRLAchooses low load path for the network business. IRLA not only has the advantages of INXconsidering interference link number, but also measures the influences of interference linkload. The simulation results show that IRLA routing metric can significantly improvenetwork performance, effectively achieve network load balancing. On the basis of IRLA studying the load factors in the communication link and itsinterference range, this paper proposes business differentiated and load aware (BDLA)routing metric by using the node classification, outage rate and gateway capacity ratio.BDLA uses the outage capacity to improve the ragional load aware method. In addition,BDLA provides the best path for client business and Internet business in multi-gatewayWMN by using the node classification and computing gateway capacity ratio. Simulationresults show that BDLA routing metric can significantly improve the network capacity,balance the gateway node load, reduce the packet loss rate and average end-to-end delay, andachieve the goal of the network load balancing.The work and research results of this paper could provide references for the research onload balancing routing metric in wireless mesh networks.