Improving load balancing, path length, and stability in low-cost wireless backhauls

Futuristic wireless networks are being proposed to promote a significant improvement in performance, mainly in highly dense scenarios. However, cost constraints are also a key concern for the next generation of wireless networks. In this context, Low-cost Wireless Backhauls (LWBs) can provide relevant contributions. LWBs are based on WLAN technologies, such as Wireless Mesh Networks, in which gateways to the wired networks are potential bottlenecks, and load balancing is critical for performance. In spite of several proposals to deal with load balancing, they fail to combine three key aspects: (1) stability, (2) reduction of the average path length, and (3) throughput fairness. Our proposal addresses these aspects by adopting a joint approach for routing and channel assignment. The routing part is composed of a heuristic that employs an on-demand local solution in which load balancing is combined with the three aforementioned key aspects. We have carried out an in-depth simulation study in ns-3 to assess the impact of our proposal on traffic performance when compared with the state of the art. Our proposal is superior in most of the scenarios, in particular in terms of stability and average path length. Our proposal also increases the aggregate throughput and minimum throughput per flow in the network, especially when the number of flows is large.