Evaluating Load Balancing in Peer-to-Peer Resource Sharing Algorithms for Wireless Mesh Networks

Claudia Canali, M. Elena Renda and Paolo Santi

Istituto di Informatica e Telematica - C.N.R.
I-56124
Pisa (PI), ITALY

Technical Report Number: 2008-TR-08
Via G. Moruzzi,1
I-56124 Pisa (PI) ITALY

Abstract. Wireless mesh networks are a promising area for the deployment of new wireless communication and networking technologies. In this paper, we address the problem of enabling effective peer-to-peer resource sharing in this type of networks. In particular, we consider the well-known Chord protocol for resource sharing in wired networks and the recently proposed MeshChord specialization for wireless mesh networks, and compare their performance under various network settings for what concerns total generated traffic and load balancing. Both iterative and recursive key lookup implementation in Chord/MeshChord are considered in our extensive performance evaluation. The results confirm superiority of MeshChord with respect to Chord, and show that recursive key lookup is to be preferred when considering communication overhead, while similar degree of load unbalancing is observed. However, recursive lookup implementation reduces the efficacy of MeshChord cross-layer design with respect to the original Chord algorithm. MeshChord has also the advantage of reducing load unbalancing with respect to Chord, although a moderate degree of load unbalancing is still observed, leaving room for further improvement of the MeshChord design.

For full paper: please contact me (Elena.Renda_AT_iit.cnr.it).