Optimal multipath forwarding in planned wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have emerged in the last years as a cost-efficient alternative to traditional wired access networks. In the context of WMNs resources are intrinsically scarce, which has led to the proposal of dynamic routing in order to fully exploit the network capacity. We argue instead in favour of separating routing from forwarding (i.e. a la MPLS). Our proposal is a dynamic load-balancing scheme that forwards incoming packets along several pre-established paths in order to minimize a certain congestion function. We consider a particular but very typical scenario: a planned WMN where all links do not interfere with each other. We use a simple and versatile congestion function: the sum of the average queue length over all network nodes interfaces. We present a method to learn this function from measurements and several simulations to illustrate the framework, comparing our proposal with the IEEE 802.11s standard.