Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been drawing significant attention in recent years due to their flexibility in providing extensive wireless backbone. WMNs typically consist of mesh routers and mesh clients with each node operating not only as a host but also as a router. Due to the traffic patterns in WMNs, load-balancing becomes an important issue and may degrade the performance of the entire network. This paper proposes a routing metric known as Weighted Cumulative Expected Transmission Time with Load-Balancing (WCETT-LB) for wireless mesh networks. WCETTT-LB enhances the basic Weighted Cumulative Expected Transmission Time (WCETT) by incorporating load-balancing into the routing metric. Unlike existing schemes, WCETT-LB implements load-balancing at mesh routers. WCETT-LB provides a congestion-aware routing and traffic splitting mechanism to achieve global load-balancing in the network. By conducting an extensive simulation experiments, the result shows that WCETT-LB outperforms the existing routing metrics in load-balancing in terms of achieving high packet delivery ratio, low average end-to-end delay and low average congestion level in wireless mesh networks. The qualitative and quantitative analysis also show the significance of the proposed scheme.
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