A Gateway Placement Algorithm in Wireless Mesh Networks

An innovative gateway placement scheme is proposed for wireless mesh networks (WMNs) in this paper. In the WMN model, a regular grid backbone network comprising of mesh routers overlays on an ad hoc network comprising of mesh clients; a certain amount of gateways is chosen among mesh routers to provide Internet access. Thus, given the number of gateways, the proposed gateway placement scheme provides a framework of maximizing the throughput of WMNs through proper placement of these gateways. The location of a gateway is determined based on a new performance metric called multi-hop traffic-flow weight (MTW). The MTW computation takes into account many factors that impact the throughput of WMNs, i.e., the number of mesh routers, the number of mesh clients, the number of gateways, traffic demand from mesh clients, locations of gateways, and possible interference among gateways. The performance of the proposed gateway placement scheme is evaluated through simulations. Experimental results show that it constantly outperforms other schemes with a large margin.