A service-oriented routing scheme with load balancing in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks will play an important role in the next-generation wireless communication systems as it can provide wide coverage and scalable broadband Internet access services. However, congestion in such networks may lead to throughput degradation, packet loss and longer transmission delay. Therefore, routing and traffic forwarding schemes which are aware of the congestion status of a wireless network can efficiently improve network performance. In this paper, we propose a new congestion-aware routing scheme which may direct different paths for different services types, according to network congestion status. The goal of this routing scheme is to use traffic load metric for choosing a high throughput path for each mesh client towards the most appropriate Internet gateway so that load balancing is achieved among gateways. Simulations based on ns2 are conducted in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, considering both UDP and TCP traffic classes. We observe that the proposed scheme outperforms the legacy routing scheme in the simulated scenarios.