Potential routing in wireless mesh network based on electrostatic theory and FDM

Abstract

Wireless mesh network is attracting researchers’ attention these days, due to its promising role as a widely deployed commercial wireless network in the future. However, wireless mesh network still faces some challenges. One of these challenges is implementing a routing protocol that guarantees high performance with acceptable usage of network resources. The routing protocol should tolerate the sensitivity of the wireless medium and balance the load on the network. Finally, it should handle congestion scenarios that often happen around the gateways. We propose Autonomous Load-balancing Field-based Anycast routing (ALFA) which is based on an analogy to physics, using Poisson’s equation and finite difference method (FDM) to calculate a metric that reflects congestion degree as well as distance to a destination. In this analogy we try to make the packet movement in the network behave similar to the charge behavior in an electrostatic field. The simulation results show the superiority of our protocol compared with the conventional routing protocols. Using ALFA we obtain an increase in the network throughput and delivery ratio with a decrease in the end-to-end delay. The results prove that ALFA achieves better load balancing, congestion avoidance, and gateway load sharing, especially when the traffic is not equally distributed over the network.