MO‐CSO‐based load‐balanced routing in MRMC WMN

The multi‐radio–multi‐channel wireless mesh networks (MRMC WMNs) have attracted much attention due to their low cost, reliable coverage, stable topology, and so forth. Load balancing among gateways (GWs) is a challenging task in MRMC WMNs. The GW nodes with higher loads will lead to disconnected network. GW and shortest path selection may increase traffic concentration which leads to congestion and collision in network. In this study, a multi‐objective competitive swarm optimiser (MO‐CSO) with analytic hierarchy process‐based (AHP) load‐balancing technique is proposed among the multiple GW nodes that provide communication between server and user to select the lightly loaded GWs, so that more packets will be delivered to the fixed host in Internet. The proposed method selects four GW parameters that are GW connecting degree, GW capacity indicator, traffic in collision domain, and path cost. The objective functions are minimisation of delay and maximising the channel utilisation, network throughput, and balancing network traffic. The MO‐CSO with AHP method is utilised to select the best GW and path which combines all four parameters. Simulation results show that the proposed MO‐CSO improves the network performance by maximum throughput while compared with the existing routing strategies such as SBR, ETX, LG, NG, and IR.