Improving Overall WMN Performance in Peak Times Using Load-sharing Aware Gateways

In recent years, Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a compelling topic to many network researchers due to its low cost in deployment, ease and simplicity in installation and scalability and robustness in operation. In WMN, Gateway nodes (Access Point-AP) are in charge of steering the traffic from the external network (e.g. Internet...) to client devices or mesh clients. The limited bandwidth of wireless links between Gateways and intermediate mesh routers makes the Gateways becomes the bottleneck of the mesh network in both uplink stream and downlink stream. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to permit Gateways collaboratively work to manipulate the traffic to fit our network. They will move the traffic from congested links to the unused capacity on other links.