Load Balancing in Wireless Mesh Networks Based on OpenFlow

The wireless mesh network (WMN) is a state-of-the-art networking standard for the next generation of wireless networks. The construction of these networks is based on a network of wireless routers forwarding each other’s packets in a multi-hop manner. The advantages of WMNs are that they can be constructed over a wide area at low cost and have excellent expandability and flexibility. In order to communicate with high throughput in a WMN, routing with load balancing is needed. For this issue, distributed routing algorithms or the centralized architecture of the OpenFlow protocol have been proposed. However, in the distributed routing protocol, once a route is created, it continues to be used, even if the load increases, until one of its routers drops out. However, there are no load-balancing algorithms for large-scale WMNs with a centralized architecture. In this study, we propose a new routing architecture that centrally manages the results of distributed routing protocols by OpenFlow and dynamically balances the load. We also performed simulations to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme using OpenFlow.