Load Balance Routing Protocol in Wireless Mesh Network Based on Cross-Layer Knowledge

Wireless mesh network (WMN) is a new kind of distributed broadband network and has drawn great attention since it has good scalability, robustness and self-organization. However, routing protocols in traditional wireless networks such as wireless sensor network (WSN) and Ad Hoc network cannot be directly used in WMN, such as those minimum hops based routing protocols that have poor performance in WMN. To provide a routing protocol suitable for WMN, a load balance routing protocol in WMN is proposed based on crosslayer knowledge and takes Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV) as a prototype, namely Load Balance Cross Layer based AODV (LBCL-AODV). In this protocol, not only the hop counts in AODV are considered, but also cross-layer information is used as metric to optimize route selection through using node load and packet delivery rate performance parameters. WMN always suffers from the load unbalance problem which degrades the network performance. To solve this problem, a load dynamically migration method is proposed which can migrate the traffic from busy routes to empty paths. The simulation results show that LBCL-AODV can reduce the end-to-end delay, increase the delivery rate and achieve the load balance.