Load-Balanced Multiple Gateway Enabled Wireless Mesh Network for Applications in Emergency and Disaster Recovery

A gateway node in a WMN acts as bridge between mesh nodes and the external network in order to exchange information between the wireless mesh network operating in a disaster stricken area and remotely located rescue headquarters and government agencies. Using a single gateway, WMN creates huge congestion on the routes to the gateway, as all the data traffic may travel in the same direction using longer routes to access the gateway node, causing channel contention between nodes that operate within carrier sensing range of each other. Therefore a multiple gateway environment is crucial during WMN application in emergency and disaster recovery. This paper presents the design and implementation of a Load-Balanced Gateway Discovery routing protocol called LBGD-AODV, which provides multiple gateway support in Wireless Mesh Network. LBGD-AODV is designed as an extension to the Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol and uses a periodic gateway advertisement scheme equipped with an efficient algorithm to avoid congestion by establishing load-balanced routes to the gateway nodes for Internet traffic. The evaluation tests show that the LBGD-AODV has not compromised the efficiency of basic AODV routing and has improved the performance of the network.