Dynamic Traffic Splitting in a Multi-Radio Multi-Hop Network

WiFi and WiMAX are two popular wireless standards, where WiFi is a wireless LAN standard and WiMAX is a wireless MAN standard. WiFi (IEEE 802.11) provides coverage of few hundred feet whereas WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) covers a range of upto 40 miles. Nowadays multiple radios are equipped within a single device. One way to achieve high performance in a network consisting of such multi-radio devices is by splitting traffic over the multiple radios. Research work has shown that traffic splitting has a positive impact on network throughput. In this work, our objective is to split the data traffic dynamically in an ad-hoc network with such hybrid nodes equipped with WiFi and WiMAX radios. We have used Bee-Hive Routing Protocol to make routing decisions in the network and analyze the effect of traffic splitting on network throughput.