Load Balancing in Dense Wireless Multihop Networks

Note: This applet merely illustrates the problem and different paths sets. The estimated performance quantities are not necessarily accurate.

This applet demonstrates different routing strategies for large scale wireless multihop networks. The shortest path routes in such a network typically guide unnecessarily much traffic in the center of the network and a bottleneck emerges (growded center effect). The modelling approach taken here assumes that the number of nodes tends to infinity and that the mean number of hops between two nodes is also very large.

You can draw connections by pressing the left button of your mouse, and with the middle/right button a path field to the current location is drawn.
Source and destination locations for each packet flow are drawn independently from uniform distribution over the given area (unit disk or unit square).
Arrival rate is adjustable via offered load, a=Λ / μ. Connections arrive according to a Poisson arrival process with rate Λ and have a mean holding time of 30 seconds.
Traffic load is defined as scalar packet flux, and the graph on bottom left corresponds to normalized scalar packet flux as a function of r when the packet arrival rate is equal to one, Λ = 1 pkt/s. The graphical traffic load illustrates the scalar flux along a horizontal cut from the origin to boundary, but the numerical min/max are for whole area (important for unit square).

Large version