Load Balancing and Mobility Management in Multi-homed Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks enlarge the wireless coverage area by interconnecting relatively stationary wireless routers (mesh routers). As wireless mesh networks are envisioned to provide high-bandwidth broadband Internet service to a large community of users, the Internet gateway, which acts as a central point of Internet attachment for the mesh networks, is likely to suffer heavily from the scramble for shared wireless resources because of aggregated traffic toward the Internet. It causes performance decrement on end-to-end transmissions. We propose a scheme to balance the load in a mesh network based on link quality variation to different Internet gateways. Moreover, under the mesh coverage, mobile nodes can move around and connect to nearby mesh routers while still keeping the connections to the Internet through the best gateway in terms of link quality. In this structure, gateways perform the balancing procedure through wired links. Information about gateways and mobile node's location is distributed appropriately so that every mesh router can quickly recognize the best gateway as well as the positions of mobile nodes. This distributed information assists mobile nodes to perform fast handoff. Significant benefits are shown by the performance analysis.