Gateway Load Balancing in Future Tactical Networks

In future tactical networks, gateway nodes will have an important role in connecting different military communications platforms together to form a consolidated network. To increase capacity for upstream/downstream traffic as well as resiliency, more than one gateway should be deployed. In this context, performing gateway load balancing is vital in order to take full advantage of the resources available and thereby improve the performance. Previous work has shown that a number of factors such as the level of asymmetry, offered load, and gateway location may influence the performance of load balancing. However these parameters alone cannot explain why the performance of load balancing is high for certain topologies while it is very poor for others. Obviously, the specific layout of a topology also plays a crucial role on the efficiency of load balancing. We question what are the differences between topologies where load balancing is efficient from the topologies where it is inefficient? The work in this paper thus aims to find the answer to this question, and to explore the nature of performing load balancing in wireless multi-hop networks. Through the knowledge acquired we propose a Radio load based Load Balancing scheme (RLLB). Simulations of many randomly generated topologies show that the performance of RLLB is promising.