Neighbour traffic-aware load balancing method in ad hoc networks

Load balancing in ad hoc networks is more challenging issue than that in wired networks because the nature of decentralized network management and terminal mobility makes it difficult to realize appropriate controls for the whole network. Although some traffic-based load balancing methods that work with rerouting mechanisms have been proposed, they are, due to the overhead for rerouting, hard to adapt the environment where the traffic or the topology changes in a short period. Furthermore, the conventional methods cannot always find appropriate routes since they only give attention to the current transmission route. This paper proposes a load balancing method based on adaptive transmission rate control using neighbouring terminals' status. The proposed method does not adopt a rerouting mechanism but introduce a rate control so that we do not have to consider the overhead for rerouting. Computer simulation showed that, depending on terminals' status, our method achieves more effective load balancing, as well as better throughput, than the conventional rerouting-based methods.