Routing With Load Balancing In Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks technology has drawn considerable attention as a promising broadband access technology despite the increase in the number of internet access technologies. It has been found that increasing the number of the gateways ordinarily, does not results in network throughputs as it is intended unless load balancing scheme is also employed in the network. A load balancing scheme is required to balance the traffic in the network across the various gateways nodes and avoids overloading any gateway node. In this paper, AODV routing protocol is modified to combine the route discovery process with a load balancing technique. The modified AODV selects a route to the destination based on the current load of the intermediate nodes and selects a gateway from the available mesh network gateways based on its current load, the simulations show that this load balancing technique will improve the performance of the wireless mesh networks.