Abstract—We propose an adaptive online load-balancing protocol for Multi-Gateway Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) which, based on the current network conditions, balances load between gateways. Our protocol (GWLB) achieves two goals: (i) alleviating congestion in affected domains and (ii) balancing load to improve flow fairness across domains. As a result of applying GWLB the throughput and fairness of flows improves. The proposed scheme effectively takes into account the elastic nature of TCP traffic, and intra-flow and inter-flow interference when switching flows between domains. Through simulations, we analyze performance and compare with a number of proposed strategies, showing that GWLB outperforms them. In particular, we have observed average flow throughput gains of 104 % over the nearest gateway strategy. I.

The Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) has become the focus of much research since they allow increased network coverage, low cost and easy deployment. WMN includes the Internet Gateways (IGW), mesh routers and mesh clients forming a three layer architecture. Throughput and fairness are major issues in WMN as the network needs to satisfy increasing network demands and must be fair to all the clients requesting the demand. The gateway may become a bottleneck as all the traffic in WMN is routed to and from the gateway. All these above factors affect the performance of network. Thus the scheduling and load-balancing have become main challenges in WMN. Several scheduling and load balancing schemes have been discussed in this paper. Two scheduling models explored are interference-based and tree-based. Four load balancing schemes discussed are path-based, gateway-based and mesh-router-based.