The RIMO gateway selection approach for mesh networks: Towards a global Internet access for all

Abstract

Community wireless mesh networks have emerged as cooperative initiatives to provide Internet Access in areas where traditional ISP costs are not affordable for the population. It is common in wireless mesh networks sharing several capacity limited Internet gateways to provide Internet access. As routing does not handle capacity planning, end-users have to select gateways in such a way that the overall capacity of all gateways could be used effectively. An efficient gateway selection should minimize the processing logic and measurements over the mesh network. Selecting a high performance gateway can also ensure that the overall network load is balanced. This paper presents RIMO, a standalone best-effort algorithm for client nodes to select their preferred gateway without interacting with other client nodes. RIMO-based selection matches the gateway performance of the reference brute-force and omniscient algorithms for 60% of the test duration while reducing the gateway performance measurement cost from a factor of n to 2. With a reduced overhead and high efficiency, the RIMO algorithm automates the aggregation of multiple Internet gateways in wireless mesh networks, which results in robust last mile Internet connectivity to people in vulnerable situation.