On Traffic Load Distribution and Load Balancing in Dense Wireless Multihop Networks

We study the load balancing problem in a dense wireless multihop network, where a typical path consists of a large number of hops, that is, the spatial scales of a typical distance between source and destination and mean distance between the neighboring nodes are strongly separated. In this limit, we present a general framework for analyzing the traffic load resulting from a given set of paths and traffic demands. We formulate the load balancing problem as a minmax problem and give two lower bounds for the achievable minimal maximum traffic load. The framework is illustrated by considering the load balancing problem of uniformly distributed traffic demands in a unit disk. For this special case, we derive efficient expressions for computing the resulting traffic load for a given set of paths. By using these expressions, we are able to optimize a parameterized set of paths yielding a particularly flat traffic load distribution which decreases the maximum traffic load in the network by[inline-graphic not available: see fulltext] in comparison with the shortest-path routing.