PROCEEDINGS OF ― 4th NATIONAL CONFERENCE on ADVANCED COMPUTING

TECHNOLOGIES(NCACT‘11) ― on FEBRUARY 2,2011 @ S.A.ENGINEERING COLLEGE

EFFICIENT ROUTING BASED ON LOAD

BALANCING IN WIRELESS MESH NETWORKS
*S. Sumathi, **S.Bharathiraja
Vel Tech Multi Tech Dr.Rangaragan & Dr.Sakunthala Engineering College, Anna University
Avadi, Chennai, India
*sumathikumarapandian@gmail.com
**bharathiraja.88s@gmail.com

Abstract—In This paper proposes a usually equipped with multiple wireless

clustered routing scheme for wireless
mesh networks (WMNs). In a WMN, the
traffic load tends to be unevenly
distributed over the network. In this
situation, the clustered routing scheme
can balance the load, and consequently,
enhance the overall network capacity.
We design a routing scheme which
maximizes the utility. In this system
WMN is divided into multiple clusters for
load control. A cluster head estimates
traffic load in its cluster. In this paper
we propose an algorithm to network
these mesh nodes in to well define
clusters with less-energy-constrained
gateway nodes acting as cluster heads,
and balance load among these gateways.
Simulation results show how our
approach can balance the load and
improve the lifetime of the system.
Keywords— Wireless mesh networks,
cluster head
Introduction
T IN Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are
dynamically self-organized and self-configured,
with the nodes in the network automatically
establishing an ad hoc network and
maintaining the mesh connectivity. WMNs are
comprised of two types of nodes: mesh
routers and mesh clients. Other than the
routing capability for gateway/bridge functions
as in a conventional wireless router, a mesh
router contains additional routing functions to
support mesh networking. Through multi-hop
communications, the same coverage can be
achieved by a mesh router with much lower
transmission power. To further improve the
flexibility of mesh networking, a mesh router is
interfaces built on either the same or different
wireless access technologies.
Inspite of all these differences, mesh and
conventional wireless routers are usually built
based on a similar hardware platform. Mesh
routers have minimal mobility and form the
mesh backbone for mesh clients. Thus,
although mesh clients can also work as a
router for mesh networking, the hardware
platform and software for them can be much
simpler than those for mesh routers. For
example, communication protocols for mesh
clients can be light-weight, gateway or bridge
functions do not exist in mesh clients, only a
single wireless interface is needed in a mesh
client, and so on.
In the WMN, a great portion of users
intends to communicate with outside networks
via the wired gateways.In such environment,
the wireless links around the gateways are
likely to be a bottleneck of the network. If
therouting algorithm does not take account of
the traffic load,some gateways may be
overloaded while the others maynot. This load
imbalance can be resolved by introducing a
load-aware routing scheme that adopts the
routing metric with load factor. When the
load-aware routing algorithm is designed to
maximize the system capacity, the major
benefit of the load-aware routing is the
enhancement of the overallsystem capacity
due to the use of underutilized paths.Although
there have been some works on load-aware
routing for mobile ad-hoc networks andWMNs
, they simply include some load factors in the
routing metric without consideration of
thesystem-wide performance.In this paper, we
propose a load-aware routing scheme,which
maximizes the total utility of the users in the

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TECHNOLOGIES(NCACT‘11) ― on FEBRUARY 2,2011 @ S.A.ENGINEERING COLLEGE
WMN.The utility is a value which quantifies
how satisfied a user is with the network. Since
the degree of user satisfaction depends on the
network performance, the utility can begiven
as a function of the user throughput.
Generally, the utility function is concave to
reflect the law of diminishing marginal utility.
To design the scheme, we use the dual
decomposition method for utility maximization
.Using this method, we can incorporate not
only the load aware routing scheme but also
congestion control and fair rate allocation
mechanisms into the WMN. Most notably, we
can implement the load-aware routing scheme
in a distributed way owing to the structure of
the dual decomposition method.
In the proposed routing
scheme, a WMN is divided into multiple
overlapping clusters. A cluster head takes role
of controlling the traffic load on the wireless
links in its cluster. The cluster head
periodically estimates the total traffic load on
the cluster and increases the ―link costs‖ of
the links in the mesh client. . In this paper we
propose an algorithm to network these mesh
nodes in to well define clusters with less-
energy-constrained gateway nodes acting as
cluster heads, and balance load among these
gateways. Simulation results show how our
approach can balance the load and improve
the lifetime of the system
2 RELATED WORKS
For the WMN, a number of routing
metrics and algorithms have been proposed to
take advantage of the stationary
topology. The first routing metric is the ETX ,
which is the expected number of
transmissions required to deliver a packet to
the neighbor. In minimum loss (ML) metric
this is used to find the route with lowest end-
to-end loss probability. The medium time
metric (MTM) is proposed for the multirate
network.The MTM of a link is inverse
proportional to the physical layer transmission
rate of the link. The ETT is a combination of
the ETX and the MTM. The ETT is a required
time to transmit a single packet over a link in
the multirate network, calculated in
consideration of both the number of
transmissions and the physical layer
transmission rate.
The routing metric and algorithm
for the multiradio WMN, which are the WCETT
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and the multi radio link quality source routing
(MR-LQSR), respectively. The WCETT is a
modification of the ETT to consider the intra
flow interference. While the WCETT only
considers the intra flow interference, the MIC
and the interference aware (iAWARE) take
account of the interflow interference as well as
the intra flow interference.
The mETX and the ENT are
proposed to cope with the fast link quality
variation. These routing metrics contain the
standard deviation of the link quality in
addition to the average link quality. The
blacklist-aided forwarding (BAF) algorithm in
explains to tackle the problem of shortterm
link quality degradation by disseminating the
blacklist, i.e., a set of currently degraded links.
The ExOR algorithm explains the next hop
after the transmission for that hop without
predetermined routes. The ExOR can choose
the next hop that successfully received the
packet, and therefore, it is robust to packet
error and link quality variation. The resilient
opportunistic mesh routing(ROMER) algorithm
uses opportunistic forwarding to deal with
short-term link quality variation. The
ROMER maintains the long-term routes and
opportunistically expands or shrinks them at
runtime.
The ad hoc on-demand distance
vector spanning tree (AODV-ST) is an
adaptation of the AODV protocol to the WMN
with the wired gateways. The AODV-ST
constructs a spanning tree of which the root is
the gateway. A routing and
channel assignment algorithm for the
multichannel WMN.
In this algorithm, a spanning tree
is formed in
such a way that a node attaches itself to the
parent node.
The load-aware routing protocols incorporate
the load factor into their routing metrics. The
dynamic load-aware routing (DLAR) takes as
the routing metric the number of packets
queued in the node interface. The load-
balanced ad hoc routing (LBAR) counts then
umberof active pathson a node and its
neighbors, and uses it as a routing metric.
Both the DLAR and LBAR are designed for the
mobile ad hoc network, and aim to reduce the
packet delay and the packet loss ratio. An
admission control and load balancing
algorithm is proposed for the 802.11 mesh
 PROCEEDINGS OF ― 4th NATIONAL CONFERENCE on ADVANCED COMPUTING
TECHNOLOGIES(NCACT‘11) ― on FEBRUARY 2,2011 @ S.A.ENGINEERING COLLEGE

networks. In this work, the available radio
time (ART) is calculated for each node, and
the route with the largest ART is selected
when a new connection is requested.This
algorithm tries to maximize the average
number of connections. The WCETT load
balancing (WCETT-LB) metric. The WCETT-LB
is the WCETT augmented by the load factor
consisting of the average queue length and
the degree of traffic concentration.
The QoS-aware routing algorithm
with congestion control and load balancing
(QRCCLB) calculates the number of congested
nodes on each route and chooses the route
with the smallest number of congested
nodes.Compared to these load-aware routing
protocols, the
proposed routing scheme has three major
advantages. First,the proposed scheme is
design to maximize the system capacity by
considering all necessary elements for load
balancing, e.g., the interference between
flows, the link capacity, and the user demand,
etc. On the other hand, the existing protocols
fail to reflect these elements since they use
heuristically designed routing metrics. For
example, the DLAR, the ART, and the WCETT-
LB do not take account of the interference
between flows. Also, the link capacity is not
considered by the DLAR, the LBAR, the ART,
and the QRCCLB. Second, the proposed
scheme can guarantee fairness between users.
When the network load is high, it is of
importance for users to fairly share scarce
radio resources.
However, the existing protocols
cannot fairly allocate resources, since they are
unable to distinguish which route is
monopolized by a small number of users.
Third, the proposed scheme can provide
routes stable over time. Since most of the
existing protocols adopt highly variable routing
metrics such as the queue length or the
collision probability, they are prone to suffer
from the route flapping problem.
We design the proposed routing
scheme by using the dual decomposition
method for the network utility maximization.
To use this method, one should formulate the
global optimization problem that is to
maximize the total system utility under the
constraints on the traffic flows and the radio
resources. After the constraints are relaxed by
the Lagrange multipliers, the whole problem
can be decomposed into the subproblems
which are solved by the different network
layers in the different network nodes. In the
decomposed problem, the Lagrange multipliers
act as a interface between the layers and the
nodes, enabling the distributed entities to find
the global optimal solution only by solving
their own subproblems.
Therefore ,the dual decomposition
method provides a systematical way to design
a distributed algorithm which finds the global
optimal solution.The mesh router relays
aggregated data traffic of mesh clients to and
from the IP core network. Typically, a mesh
router has multiple wireless Interfaces to
communicate with other mesh routers, and
each wireless interface corresponds to one
wireless channel.
These wireless channels have
different characteristics, because wireless
interfaces are running on different frequencies
and built on either the same or different
wireless access technologies, e.g., IEEE
802.11a/b/g/n. It is also possible that
directional antennas are employed on some
interfaces to establish wireless channels over
long distances.
3 SYSTEM MODEL
3.1 Mesh Network Structure
Each wireless router in a WMN
is fixed at a location. Thus, the WMN topology
does not change frequently and the channel
quality is quasi-static. In addition, each

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wireless router serves so many subscribers
(i.e., users) in general that the characteristic
of the aggregated traffic is stable over time.
Therefore, we design the routing
scheme under the system model of which
topology and user configuration are stable. In
Fig. 1, we illustrate an example of the WMN.
In this figure, a node stands for a wireless
router, which not only delivers data for its own
users, but also relays data traffic for other
wireless routers. Among nodes, there are
some gateway nodes connected to the wired
backhaul network. Each user is associated
with its serving node. In this paper, we do not
deal with the interface between a user and its
serving node to focus on the mesh network
itself. Through the serving node, a user can
send (receive) data traffic to (from) the other
user in the WMN or to (from) outside networks
via the gateway nodes. If node n can transmit
data to node m directly (i.e., without relaying),
there exists a link from the node n to the
nodem. In this paper, we define a link as
unidirectional.
3.2 Physical and Medium Access Control Layer
Model
The proposed scheme can be
implemented on top of various physical
(PHY) and medium access control (MAC)
layer protocols that utilize a limited
bandwidth and divide the time for multiple
access, for example, such as the carrier sense
multiple access/collision avoidance
(CSMA/CA), the time division multiple access
(TDMA),
and the reservation ALOHA (R-ALOHA).
The effective transmission rate of a
link is defined as the number of actually
transmitted bits divided by the time spent for
data transmission, calculated in consideration
of retransmissions due to errors. That is, the
effective transmission rate can be calculated
as the PHY layer transmission rate times the
probability of successful transmission. The
PHY layer transmission rate can be fixed, or
can be adaptively adjusted according to the
channel quality by means of rate control
schemes such as the receiver-based autorate
(RBAR). In the WMN under consideration, the
effective transmission rate of a link is assumed
to be static for a long time due to fixed
locations of nodes. We define dl as the
effective transmission rate of the link l.
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If all flows convey data traffic
through each route at their flow data rates,
the sum of the data rates of traffic passing
through link l is calculated as Pr2Hl Pf2Qr
_f;r, where Hl is defined as the set of the
indices of all routes passing through the link l,
and Qr is the indices of all flows that use the
route r.We define the ―airtime ratio‖ of the link
l, denoted by al, as the ratio of the time taken
up by the transmission to the total time of link
l. The airtime ratio of the link l can be
calculated as the sum of the data rates on the
link l divided by the effective transmission rate
of the link l. That is,
Now, we discuss the restriction on the
radio resource allocation. For the protocols
under consideration, time is the only radio
resource, which is shared by links for data
transmission. If two links are adjacent enough
to interfere with each other, packets cannot be
conveyed through the two links at the same
time. To incorporate this restriction into the
proposed scheme, we divide the WMN into
multiple overlapping clusters. A cluster
includes the links adjacent enough to interfere
with each other. Therefore, any pair of links in
the same cluster cannot deliver packets
simultaneously. A cluster is generally indexed
by c, and let C be the set of the indices of all
clusters in the WMN. We also define Mc as the
set of all links in the cluster c. The proposed
scheme estimates the traffic load in each
cluster. The traffic load in a cluster is the sum
of the traffic load on the links in the cluster. If
the traffic load in a cluster is estimated to be
too high, the proposed scheme can redirect
the routes passing through the overloaded
cluster for load balancing. The airtime ratio of
a link represents the traffic load on the link. If
the sum of the airtime ratios of the links in a
cluster exceeds a certain bound, the cluster
can be regarded as overloaded. Roughly, we
assume that a fixed portion of the time can be
used for data transmission, while the
remainder is used for the purpose of control,
e.g., control message exchange and random
back-off. Let _ denote the ratio of the time for
data transmission to the whole time. Since
only a link can convey data traffic at a time
within a cluster, the sum of the airtime ratios
of the links in a cluster cannot exceed _.
Therefore, we have the following constraint:
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practical point of view, the clusters do not

need to cover all possible cliques, but it is
enough for the clusters to be formed in such a
way that the traffic load in each region of the
WMN is separately evaluated
In Fig. 1, we give an example organization of
clusters.
4. Load-Balanced Clustering
Note that we do not draw all
The main objective of our
clusters to avoid overcrowding. In this figure,
approach is to cluster sensor network
four clusters are presented, each of which is
efficiently around few high-energy gateway
indicated by a dashed circle. Suppose that a
nodes. Clustering enables network scalability
cluster includes all incoming and outgoing links
to large number of Sensors and extends the
of the nodes in the dashed circle. In this
life of the network by allowing the Sensors to
example, the clusters 1 and 2 cover the areas
conserve energy through communication with
around the gateway nodes 1 and 2,
Closer nodes and by balancing the load among
respectively. When the estimated traffic load
the gateway nodes. Gateways associate cost
around the gateway node 1 is too high, the
to communicate with each sensor in the
user taking the route to the gateway node 1
network. Clusters are formed based on the
may not achieve high data rate due to the
cost of communication and the load on the
constraint (2) for cluster 1. In this case, if the
gateways. Network setup is performed in two
gateway node 2 is lightly loaded, it is desirable
stages;
for the user to choose the route to the
Bootstrapping‘ and ‗Clustering‘.
gateway node 2 for higher data rate. Thus, it
In the bootstrapping phase, gateways discover
can be said that the traffic load is estimated
the nodes that are located within their
and controlled in the unit of the cluster for
communication range. Gateways broadcast a
global load balancing.
message indicating the start of clustering. We
The notion of a cluster corresponds
assume that receivers of sensors are open
to a clique in the conflict graph. In the conflict
throughout the clustering process. Each
graph, vertices correspond to the links in the
gateway starts the clustering at a different
WMN. An edge is drawn between two vertices
instance of time in order to avoid collisions. In
if the corresponding links interfere with each
reply the sensors also broadcast a message
other. Thus, an edge stands for confliction
with their maximum transmission power
between two vertices. A clique in the conflict
indicating their location and energy reserve in
graph is a set of vertices that mutually conflict
this message. Each node discovered in this
with each other. Unless the conflict graph is a
phase is included in a range set per gateway.
―perfect graph,‖ the clique constraints in (2)
In the clustering phase, gateways
are not tight in the strict sense even when all
calculate the cost of communication, with each
cliques (clusters) are taken into account. We
node in the range set. This
propose the centralized algorithm that
Information is then exchanged between all the
transforms the conflict graph to a perfect
gateways.
graph by adding unnecessary edges to the
After receiving the data from all the other
conflict graph. This algorithm can also be
gateways each
applied to our routing scheme. However, from
gateway start clustering nodes based on the
a practical point of view, this algorithm is
communication cost and the current load on
inefficient since it requires centralized control
its cluster. When the clustering is over, all the
and can overly reduce spatial reuse.
sensors are informed about the ID of the
Therefore, in this paper, we recommend to
cluster they belong to. Since gateways share
use the clique constraints in (2) as it is.
the common information during clustering,
Actually, these clique constraints
each sensor belongs to only one cluster. For
are enough to serve our purpose, i.e.,
inter-cluster communication all the traffic is
identifying overloaded regions in the WMN to
routed through
redirect the routes. Also, there can be too
the gateways.
many cliques in the conflict graph, and
therefore, considering all of them can render
the proposed scheme highly complex.Froma

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4.1 Optimization Heuristics
Before minimizing the objective
function we allocate the nodes in the ESet to
their respective clusters and calculate the load.
If we allocate the remaining nodes to the
clusters only by minimizing the objective
function we experience large overlapping of
clusters. Considering only the load on
gateways as a factor for clustering might do so
at the expense of sensors. Our experiments
also show that some sensors are not part of
the gateways nearest to them. This will
increase the communication energy of the
sensors. Exhaustive search methods like
simulated annealing can be used to find the
optimum results to balance the load as well as
maintain the minimum distance with the
gateway. But by using these methods the
complexity of the algorithm is increased with
the increase in sensors and gateways. In order
to balance load of gateways and preserve
precious energy of sensors, we select few
nodes that are located radically near a
gateway and include them in the ESet of the
gateway. A node is included in the ESet of a
gateway if, its distance to the gateway is less
than a critical distance. Initially, the critical
distance is equal to the minimum distance in
the ESet. Then the critical distance is gradually
increased till the median of distances in ESet is
reached. This procedure is repeated for all the
gateways based on increasing order of
cardinality, which balances load while
performing the selection. Experimental results
show that this method significantly reduces
the number of nodes to be considered for
exhaustive search and reduces overlapping
between the clusters.
Now, we start clustering the
remaining sensors in the system. Since
sensors cannot reach all the gateways,
minimizing objective function for those
gateways will unnecessarily increase the
complexity of algorithm. In order to save
computation for clustering we sort the sensors
based on increasing order their reach. Nodes
with same reach are grouped together to
avoid extra computation of calculating the
objective function for the gateways they
cannot reach. Nodes with lower reach are
considered first because they have fewer
clusters to join. The objective function is
calculated by assigning these nodes to the
gateways they can reach. The node becomes
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the part of the cluster for which it minimizes
the objective function. The process is repeated
till all the nodes in the sensors are not
clustered.
5 Performance Results
In this section we present some results
obtained by our simulation. To evaluate the
performance of our algorithm, we compare the
results with shortest distanceclustering where
a gateway includes a sensor in its cluster if the
distance between them is minimum. We
measure three different properties of the
system based on different metrics. Standard
Deviation of Load per cluster: Experiments are
performed to measure load on each cluster
after clustering. Standard deviation of the load
of the system gives a good evaluation of
distribution on load per cluster. We measure
the deviation in load by varying the number of
gateways from 2 to 10 in a fixed 100 nodes
network. In order to demonstrate that the
load is balanced for any setup we ran the
same experiments for 10 different normal
distributions. Same experiments are performed
with shortest distance clustering and the
results are compared with our approach.
Variance in load signifies that load is not
uniformly distributed among the clusters.
Results demonstrate that for all distributions
our approach outperforms the shortest
distance
clustering
To test our system for different sensors
densities we measured standard deviation of
load by using 5 gateways and increasing the
number of sensors in the system from 100 to
500 with uniform increments. The graph
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shown in Fig 3 clearly indicates that our
approach increase the scalability of the
system. The performance of our approach
remains constant with increase in density. The
rising curve of the shortest distance clustering
indicates that variance in load is increasing
with increase in density. The demonstrated
results are based on the normal distribution of
sensors. Average communication energy per
cluster: We measure total energy required to
communicate between gateway and all the
sensors in its cluster. Communication energy is
directly proportional to the distance between
two nodes. If clusters are formed based on
shortest distance the average energy
consumed will be minimal but the load will not
be balanced. Sensors clustered by shortest
distance method will consume less
communication energy in the beginning but
will consume more energy later due to
overhead of re-clustering. We try to minimize
the average communication energy to perform
as good as shortest distance algorithm in
terms of communication energy. The
experimental results, in Fig. 4, show that the
performance of shortest distance clustering
decreases with the increase in number of
clusters.
6. Conclusions and future work:
In this paper we have introduced an
approach to cluster unattended wireless
sensors about few high-energy gateway nodes
and balance load among these clusters. The
gateway node acts as a centralized manager
to handle the sensors
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serves as a hop to relay data from sensors
to a distant command node. If nodes are not
uniformly distributed around the gateways the
clusters formed will be of varied load, which
will affect the lifetime and energy consumption
of the system. Simulation results demonstrate
that our algorithm consistently balances load
among different clusters and performs well in
all distributions of nodes. Our future plan
includes extending the clustering model to
allow gateway mobility. Also, we plan to study
different failure scenarios in sensor networks
and introduce run-time fault-tolerance in the
system.
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