Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Engineering Volume 2013, Article ID 197295, 7 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/197295 Research Article Bandwidth Allocation Based on Traffic Load and Interference in IEEE 802.16 Mesh Networks Sanjeev Jain, 1 Vijay Shanker Tripathi, 2 and Sudarshan Tiwari 2 1 Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering, Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad, India 2 Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering, NIT, Raipur, India Correspondence should be addressed to Sanjeev Jain; snjece@gmail.com Received 26 November 2012; Revised 27 February 2013; Accepted 13 March 2013 Academic Editor: Daniele Tarchi Copyright © 2013 Sanjeev Jain et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Tis paper introduces a trafc load and interference based bandwidth allocation (TLIBA) scheme for wireless mesh network (WMN) that improves the delay and throughput performance by proper utilization of assigned bandwidth. Te bandwidth is allocated based jointly on trafc load and interference. Ten a suitable path is selected based upon the least routing metric (RM) value. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the efectiveness of the proposed approach which indicates higher bandwidth utilization and throughput as compared with existing fair end-to-end bandwidth allocation (FEBA). 1. Introduction Wireless mesh networking is an emerging hot topic and is still in infancy. Key features of WMN are being dynamically self-organized, self-confgured, self-healing, scalable, reliable, easy to deploy, and it can establish adhoc network auto- matically and maintain connectivity. WMNs are activated in the industrial standard groups, such as IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15, and IEEE 802.16. [1]. Few applications of WMN are to access broadband internet, indoor WLAN, mobile user access and connectivity. WMNs are specifcally constructed by the Firetide for providing connectivity [2]. Backhaul connectivity of the mesh networks is provided by the mesh base station in the IEEE 802.16 and controlling one or more subscriber stations is also provided. Collection of bandwidth request from subscriber station and management of resource allocation are the responsibilities of the mesh base station (BS) when a centralized scheduling scheme is used [3]. Tere are two types of routing in WMNs, namely, centralized scheduling and distributed scheduling. Te IEEE 802.16 standard provides a centralized scheduling mecha- nism that supports contention-free and resource-guarantee transmission services in mesh mode. Research is going on towards designing an efcient way to realize centralized or distributed schedule by maximizing channel utilization. Te designs are divided into two phases: routing and scheduling. First, a routing tree topology is constructed from a given mesh topology. Secondly, channel resource is allocated to the edges in the routing tree by a scheduling algorithm [4]. Te channel resource is bandwidth, which is allocated on the basis of fundamental performance parameters. Generally delay, throughput, fairness, or interference is considered for bandwidth allocation. Te wireless network has expe- rienced signifcant growth to meet the increasing band- width demands of network users and support the emerging bandwidth-intensive applications such as videoconferencing and video on demand (VoD). In the IEEE 802.16 mesh networks the bandwidth negotiation is implicit which is based on the assumption that only the one-hop neighbors of a receiver can interfere with its ongoing data reception, which is also referred to as “protocol-model.” In 802.16 mesh networks in order to satisfy the QoS in routing packets, it is very important to reserve sufcient bandwidth for the transmission of the individual links on a particular route. Because, in wireless mesh networks, the end-to-end throughput of trafc fows depends on the path length, that is, the higher the number of hops, the lower the throughput becomes. Organization of this paper is as follows. In Section 2 we have presented related work. In Section 3 details of proposed