A New Paradigm for Load Balancing in WMNs

In this paper, we address the problem of load balancing in Wireless Mesh Networks. Weconsider a Cluster Based Wireless Mesh Architecture in which the WMN is divided intoclusters that could minimize the updating overhead during topology change due tomobility of mesh nodes or congestion of load on a cluster. Each cluster contains agateway that has complete knowledge about group memberships and link stateinformation in the cluster. The gateway is often elected in the cluster formation process.We consider load of gateways and try to reduce it. As a matter of fact when a gatewayundertakes to be an interface for connecting nodes of a wireless mesh network to othernetworks or internet, there would be some problems such as congestion and bottleneck,so we introduce a new paradigm for these problems. For solving bottleneck we useclustering to reduce load of gateways and after that by use of dividing cluster we preventfrom bottleneck on gateways. We study how to detect congestion on a gateway and howcan reduce loads of it that preventing from bottleneck on gateway and thereforeincreasing throughput of network to encountering many loads. So we propose analgorithm to detect bottleneck and remedies for load balancing in Wireless MeshNetworks. We also use Ns2-Emultion for implementing and testing the framework. Somequalitative results are provided to prove the correctness and the advantages of ourframework.