Gateway selection and clustering in multi-interface wireless mesh networks considering network reliability and traffic

This work considers the gateway selection and clustering problem in a multi-interface wireless mesh network. The evolved reliability and traffic-aware gateway selection scheme is here introduced to increase the performance in terms of throughput. There are 2 main phases in the proposed idea. In the first step, some Internet Gateway Candidates are selected from the mesh nodes in the network, based on the network traffic. Then, in the second step, using the path tracing method, the best of these candidates are selected as Internet gateways. Moreover, to decrease the network energy consumption, a refined evolved reliability and traffic-aware gateway selection scheme is also proposed whose effect in simulation is shown. A clustering method is later proposed exploiting the genetic algorithm to give priority to the nodes with the shortest hop to connect to the cluster head. Simulation results demonstrate how our gateway selection and clustering scheme outperforms 2 successful approaches in terms of throughput and network energy consumption.