Load-balancing routing for wireless access networks

Abstract

The widespread use of wireless devices presents new challenges for network operators, who need to provide service to ever larger numbers of mobile end users, while ensuring quality-of-service guarantees. We describe a new distributed routing algorithm that performs dynamic load-balancing for wireless access networks. The algorithm constructs a load-balanced backbone tree, which simplifies routing and avoids per-destination state for routing and per-flow state for QoS reservations. We evaluate the performance of the algorithm using several metrics including adaptation to mobility, degree of load-balance, bandwidth blocking rate, and convergence speed. We find that the algorithm achieves better network utilization by lowering bandwidth blocking rates than other methods.