A novel heuristic-based traffic distribution method for disaster zone wireless mesh networks

Recently, the research community has paid much attention to Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) for rapidly formulating disaster zone networking infrastructures. These multi-hop WMNs, with almost stationary wireless Mesh Routers (MRs) as an access network, and gateways (GWs) connected to Internet, present an attractive choice for quickly establishing post-disaster recovery networks. However, one of the main challenges in such infrastructures consists in the traffic distribution among the users for avoiding congested GWs. In this paper, we focus on the issue of distributing and balancing the traffic load among the main GWs of the disaster zone WMN. We propose a novel method for controlling the handover of some of the MRs connected to the congested GWs. The performance of our method is evaluated by conducting computer-based simulations. The simulation-results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in keeping the number of network-configuration changes to minimal while resulting in a better Fairness Index compared with other conventional techniques.