Client-Side Routing-Agnostic Gateway Selection for heterogeneous Wireless Mesh Networks

TL;DR

This paper presents a client-side, infrastructure-agnostic gateway selection method for heterogeneous Wireless Mesh Networks that improves proxy choice based on network congestion and load without requiring network modifications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel client-side gateway selection mechanism that operates independently of underlying network protocols and infrastructure, utilizing extended Vivaldi coordinates and passive load estimation.

Findings

Effectively avoids overloaded proxies and slow paths

Operates with linear overhead relative to clients and proxies

Validated in the guifi.net community wireless network

Abstract

Citizens develop Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) in many areas as an alternative or their only way for local interconnection and access to the Internet. This access is often achieved through the use of several shared web proxy gateways. These network infrastructures consist of heterogeneous technologies and combine diverse routing protocols. Network-aware state-of-art proxy selection schemes for WMNs do not work in this heterogeneous environment. We developed a client-side gateway selection mechanism that optimizes the client-gateway selection, agnostic to underlying infrastructure and protocols, requiring no modification of proxies nor the underlying network. The choice is sensitive to network congestion and proxy load, without requiring a minimum number of participating nodes. Extended Vivaldi network coordinates are used to estimate client-proxy network performance. The load of each proxy is estimated passively by collecting the Time-to-First-Byte of HTTP requests, and shared across clients. Our proposal was evaluated experimentally with clients and proxies deployed in guifi.net, the largest community wireless network in the world. Our selection mechanism avoids proxies with heavy load and slow internal network paths, with overhead linear to the number of clients and proxies.