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RESEARCH PRODUCT

A novel traffic splitting policy for performance improvement in wireless mesh networks

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©2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. Article also available from publisher: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/EW.2009.5357990 Wireless mesh networks are expected to play an important role in the next-generation wireless communication systems as it can provide wide coverage and scalable broadband Internet access services. However, as more traffic is injected into the network it may lead to throughput degradation, packet loss and longer transmission delay. In this paper, we argue that network performance can be improved by cross-layer design over multiple layers and load balancing based on service types. Correspondingly, a novel traffic splitting policy which can potentially utilize diverse paths for transmitting traffic flows of different service types from the same router has been proposed and investigated. Such a policy is able to balance traffic load, ideally aggregate capacities across multiple paths and leverage diversity among the paths to achieve low packet loss and more stable throughput.