Load-balanced Multicast Tree Routing in Multi Channel Multi Radio Wireless Mesh Networks Using a New Cost Function

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is new emerging technology that offers low-cost high-bandwidth community wireless services. This type of network requires carefully assignment of resources and load balancing in order to provide the quality guarantees to traffic flows. Load balancing avoids the creation of bottleneck nodes, and increases the network efficiency. This paper addresses the problem of multicast load balancing in Multi-Channel Multi-Radio WMNs (MCMR-WMNs). In this regard, we introduce a novel load-aware dynamic cost function to weight the links of the network. Proposed cost function considers both the benefits of Wireless Broadcast Advantage (WBA) as well as the problem of load balancing. Also, we propose a Load-balanced Multicast Tree Routing (LMTR) algorithm which provides balanced multicast trees using the defined cost function. The proposed on-demand routing scheme not only minimizes the number of transmissions, but also tries to distribute the traffic among the nodes fairly and consequently decreases the interference in the network. We also demonstrate how proposed scheme can control the trade-off between load balancing and delay. Our extensive simulations in various networks with grid and random topologies show the efficiency of LMTR in load balancing. As you will see, LMTR significantly avoids the creation of bottleneck nodes and reduces the standard deviation of traffic load on mesh routers.