A novel gateway selection technique for throughput optimization in configurable wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have attracted much attention due to their low up-front cost, easy network deployment, stable topology, robustness, reliable coverage, and so forth. These advantages are suitable for the disaster recovery applications in disaster areas, where WMNs can be advantageously utilized to restore network collapse after the disaster. In this paper, based on a new network infrastructure for WMNs, to guarantee high network performance, we focus on the issue of throughput optimization to improve the performance for WMNs. Owing to selecting different mesh router (MR) as the gateway will lead to different network throughput capacity, we propose a novel gateway selection technique to rapidly select the optimal MR as the gateway, in order to maximize the network throughput. In addition, we take into account the traffic distribution for the MR to eliminate traffic congestion in our method. The performance of our proposed method is evaluated by both numerical and simulated analysis. The simulation results demonstrate that the gateway selection method is effective and efficient to optimize the throughput for WMNs.