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Wireless bandwidth is a limited and scarce shared resource in MANETs. In our work, we are interested in the "end-to-end capacity" of the network, which we define to be the sum of the throughputs for each flow. This represents the service a network provides to its users. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol, called TB for traffic balancing, which increases the end-to-end capacity by more aggressively routing data through underutilized areas of a MANET. Simulation results show that TB performs better than other load-balancing protocols proposed in the literature. We also compare the experimental performance against lower bounds of maximum end-to-end capacity, discuss reasons for the performance gap, and identify possible future improvements to the protocol.

Several access points may be put into wireless ad hoc networks for people connecting to WWW or other Internet services. This kind of wireless network is called wireless mesh networks (WMNs) that still needs users to relay packets for other users. The meshed topology provides good reliability, market coverage, and scalability, as well as low upfront investment. However, due to the nature of routing algorithm the traffic load for a access point may be extremely heavy during particular periods while the other access points are in very light load. Consequently, the overall performance of the network are poor even the total traffic load is far below the system capacity. Traffic balancing proposed for wireless ad hoc networks provides an efficient solution to this problem. With right placement of the access points, the performance can be improved dramatically by traffic balancing.

The connection-oriented data service has been previously introduced in the IEEE 802.6 standard to support variable bit rate applications for which a certain guarantee on quality of service is required. So far, the proper tuning of the parameters of this service remains an open issue. In this work, we undertake the study of this service with the main objective of defining the needed mechanisms to properly set-up the parameters of the connection oriented service according to various quality of service requirements.