Responsive on-line gateway load-balancing for wireless mesh networks

We propose an adaptive online load-balancing protocol for multi-gateway Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) which, based on the current network conditions, balances load between gateways. Traffic is balanced at the TCP flow level and, as a result, the aggregate throughput, average flow throughput and fairness of flows improves. The proposed scheme (referred to as Gateway Load-Balancing, GWLB) is highly responsive, thanks to fast gateway selection and the fact that current traffic conditions are maintained up-to-date at all times without any overhead. It also effectively takes into account intra-flow and inter-flow interference when switching flows between gateway domains. We have found the performance achievable by routes used after gateway selection to be very close to the performance of optimal routes found by solving a MINLP formulation under the protocol model of interference. Through simulations, we analyze performance and compare with a number of proposed strategies, showing that GWLB outperforms them. In particular, we have observed average flow throughput gains of 128% over the nearest gateway strategy. 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.