Dynamic Channel Assignment and Gateway Load Balanced Routing for Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks

In this paper, we propose the dynamic channel assignment and Gateway (GW) load balanced routing protocol. In this protocol, a combined cost metric is determined incorporating channel quality, switching cost and queue length. Then the GW having the minimum cost metric is selected by the source node. Then channels are fairly assigned in the network by the selected GW between itself and the mesh clients. In GW load balanced routing, the GW selects a path with the minimum load based on the interface queue length. Congestion is detected at any intermediate router based on Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) of the queue size. Each GW estimates the traffic load at the current interval and predicts the traffic load of the next interval using Hidden Markov Model (HMM). If congestion is detected at GW, then it informs the Access Point (AP) to change to another GW. By simulation results, we show that the proposed technique reduces the network congestion and improves efficiency