Load balancing strategy in heterogeneous meshed home access network

Today???s homes are equipped with a multitude of devices using several communication technologies such as Ethernet, Wi-fi, Power Line Communications and Optical Wireless Communications forming a heterogeneous network environment. User???s needs are changing towards applications requiring high transmission speeds such as 3D gaming, enhanced interactivity, virtual reality, high definition video. Each of those applications puts several constraints on the capabilities of the network to guarantee requirements on the quality of service (QoS). This document proposes a novel solution for load balancing in multi-technology meshed networks in order to achieve QoS requirements for all applications running in the home environment. Formulating the problem as a Multi-Commodity Flow, resolving it with a column generation approach that uses Lagrangean Relaxation and Dijkstra algorithm, the effective computational complexity of the load balancing problem is decreased respect to a standard linear programming solution. Because of home gateway limited computational power and energy considerations, the linear programming solution is not feasible in home environment.