A Load-balanced Routing Consideration with Delay-based RREQ Scheme in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

The wireless mesh network (WMN) is a novel wireless network architecture that puts several wireless routers into wireless ad hoc networks for mobile nodes to access the Internet. Due to the similarity in network topology between WMN and the Mobile ad hoc network (MANET), the routing algorithm from MANET can be adopted to WMN. Traditionally, the routing algorithms in MANET choose the shortest route to build up the communication path; however, this manner may incur traffic unbalanced problems in the WMN. Those routing algorithm cannot fully utilize system capacity. In order to overcome this drawback, we propose a delay-based RREP routing named DRR to balance the traffic loading. The concept of DRR is to convert the factor of node load into the time. Once the intermediate node receives an RREQ packet, an internal extra delay proportional to the node loading is added before forwarding this RREQ packet. Using the DRR scheme, the first replied RREP packet stands for the optimal path that considers the metrics of path distance, path hop-count, intermediate node load, and neighboring node load. In this work, we also propose a new weight assignment scheme in which the node weights are proportional to the exponential of node loading. It is used to differentiate the node in different loads in order to arrive at load balanced routing. Simulation results reveal that the DRR can flexibly spread traffic among all nodes and that it extends the lifetime of an entire ad hoc network by fairly consuming each nodepsilas energy.