Wi-Fi based hotspots are used to provide broadband Internet service in airports, campuses, remote areas and others. They are time consuming and expensive to setup as they require substantial wired infrastructure to access the backhaul network and they also suffer from the last mile wireless connectivity problem. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) provide an alternative in the form of wireless backhaul network comprising of mesh nodes out of which a few known as Internet Gateway nodes are connected to the wired network. WMN overcomes the last mile wireless connectivity problem by providing multi-hop wireless connection between client nodes and the Internet Gateway nodes. A skewed traffic pattern between client nodes and Internet Gateway nodes rather than peer-topeer traffic are a feature in WMNs considering its main application in providing broadband internet. Due to the limited number of gateway nodes they become a major system bottleneck as the majority traffic is routed through them. A proper positioning of them is essential so that the network traffic is equally divided between them thereby increasing the overall throughput. We propose a method which considers the underlying routing protocol to find out the proper position of the gateway nodes which increases throughput and reduces end-to-end delay.

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Wireless mesh network Internet Gateway node positioning backhaul network mesh routers throughput routing