Gateway-aware routing for wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) provide an attractive method to provide Internet connectivity in developing regions. Traditional mesh routing protocols are designed to find high quality/throughput multihop routes in the network. However, these solutions do not consider constraints imposed by the capacity at the gateway, often the bottleneck in such rural area networks. In this paper, we demonstrate the importance of intelligent choice of gateways in WMNs. We present the design of a new gateway-aware routing metric that picks high throughput routes in the presence of heterogeneous gateways. Our evaluation in simulations as well as on a testbed show significant increase in network throughput.