Distributed Algorithms for Load Balancing in Wireless Overlay Networks
Tapan P. Karwa, Gavin Holland · 1999
Recent advances in low-power VLSI technologies have resulted in the proliferation of inexpensive mobile computing devices. Their rising popularity has increased the demand for wireless networking technologies that will enable them to connect to the Internet regardless of their physical location. This has resulted in the formation of a logical hierarchy of wireless networks, where low-bandwidth networks with wider coverage areas are layered on top of clusters of high-bandwidth networks with smaller coverage areas. These are called wireless overlay networks. Previous research has looked at using wireless overlay networks to enhance the connectivity of mobile computing devices as they move in and out of coverage areas by providing them with interfaces for each layer and then dynamically switching to upper layers when lower layers become unavailable. In this paper, we address the problem of performance robbing congestion "hot spots" that occur in the lower layers. We first present several new performance measures for wireless overlay networks, and then propose several load balancing algorithms that are designed to spread the network load across the overlays. This is a work in progress, with simulation results forthcoming.