In order to provide a reliable interconnection between a wireless mesh network and an external network, more than one border router device may be deployed. A novel load balancing method, and the related system and devices, are disclosed in this invention. By embedding actual traffic load information in the frequency of sending the border router advertisements, automatic traffic load balancing among multiple border routers is realized in 5 the system, without extra signaling overhead or any change to the beacon packet structure.

An association system for a wireless communication network includes an association initiator device and association target device. Each association target device transmits beacon messages including load data of the association target device including at least data indicative of number of currently associated router devices. After receiving the beacon message from an association target device, each association initiator device: decides whether to attempt to associate with the association target device on a basis of the load data included at least partly in the received beacon message from the at least one association target device, and send an association request message to each of the at least one association target device with which the association initiator device decides to attempt to associate. The application relates also to association methods for a wireless communication network, an association target device, an association initiator device, a computer program, and a computer readable medium.

The present innovation relates to a method for a placement of Internet Gateway (IGW) in a Backbone Wireless Mesh Networks (BWMNs) comprising: selecting the proper IGW (100); calculating the largest path the one degree nodes can reach with delay constraint (200); assigning Web Mesh Routers (WMRs) nodes to the identified IGW (300); forming a cluster with the largest degree node is the identified IGW (400); recalculating the position of IGW for intra-load balancing (500); assigning the node that has the maximum load radio to be the new IGW of the cluster (600); updating the rest of BWMN nodes (700); and forming the next clusters until no more WMR left (800). The present invention provides IGWs placement in the design phase while satisfying load balancing among IGWs and WMRs and under QoS constraints. The balancing acts encompass balancing over the load among IGWs of the entire BWMN and balancing over the load among WMRs of the entire BWMN.

A communication method, device and apparatus based on wireless ad-hoc network. The method comprises: collecting real time network topological information of a plurality of candidate communication terminals; screening the target communication terminal and the communication terminals for a target network central node and a plurality of network sub-central nodes, determining current central communication terminal and initial communication terminals corresponding to the plurality of network sub-central nodes; generating a list of centrality and generating a forwarding sequence table according to the list of centrality, generating a data time slot scheduling table based on the data time slot scheduling information, sending or forwarding the list of centrality, the forwarding sequence table and the data time slot scheduling table in the target RF channel; sending management and control instructions in the target RF channel and controlling all the initial communication terminals in the network cluster to execute the management and control instruction.

Some embodiments provide a method of transmitting data in a logical network with multiple branches and a hub cluster with multiple hubs of a first category of hubs and multiple hubs of a second category of hubs. The method, for each of the multiple branches (1) assigns a first hub of the first category of hubs to the branch (2) assigns a second hub of the second category of hubs to the branch, and (3) provides a set of application based policies to the branch. The application based policies direct the branch to route different types of network traffic of the application through the first hub than through the second hub. Each hub of the first category of hubs, in some embodiments, includes a set of resources equivalent to a set of resources of each other hub of the first category of hubs.