An efficient Neighbourhood Load Routing metric for Wireless Mesh Networks

The Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a highly capable technology that can offer low-cost and easy-deployable network connectivity to both small-size community networks and large-scale metropolitan networks. As a key emerging technology to provide the next generation broadband networking, WMN combines the advantages of both mobile ad hoc network (MANET) and traditional fixed network, attracting significant industrial and academic attentions. In WMN, the load balancing has already shown its key role in enhancing communication quality by providing reduced latency, jitter and error rate as well as improving bandwidth utilisation and allocation polices. Although there are a number of proposals on using load-aware strategy in WMN, the neighbourhood load has not been considered within the context of load balancing and high efficient WMNs. In this paper, we propose a Neighbourhood Load Routing metric to further improve the performance of existing routing protocols such as AODV in WMN. We have conducted extensive simulation experiments and our results confirm the superiority of our proposed scheme over its well-known counterparts, especially in grid topologies. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.