| Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been drawing significant attention in recent years due to their flexibility in providing extensive wireless backbone. It has been widely considered a key technology for next-generation wireless networking. Due to the traffic patterns in WMNs and inadequate design in access protocols, load balancing and fair scheduling become two important issues that can degrade the performance of the network. In this thesis, problems of load balancing and fair scheduling in WMNs are discussed. Weighted Cumulative Expected Transmission Time with Load balancing (WCETT-LB) which enhances the basic routing metric by incorporating load balancing is proposed as a potential solution for load balancing problems in WMNs. A fair scheduling scheme which adopts the concept of multi-objective optimization and assigns bandwidth data rates to mesh routers to balance fairness and network throughput is also proposed as a solution to the fair scheduling in WMNs. The experimental results in the NS2 simulation environment demonstrate that the proposed load balancing and fair scheduling solutions outperform existing solutions. |
