Integrating peer-to-peer functionalities and routing in mobile ad-hoc networks

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) impose strict requirements in terms of battery life, communication overhead and network latency, therefore optimization should be made to applications and services such as domain name service (DNS), dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) and session initiation protocol (SIP) if they are to be considered for use on MANETs. Due to the decentralized and self-organizing nature of MANETs, such applications could utilize a distributed name resolution/data storage service. Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) enable these features by virtually organizing the network topology in a peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay. P2P overlays have been designed to operate on the application layer without knowledge of the underlying network thus causing poor performance. To address this problem, we propose and evaluate two different DHTs integrated with MANET routing in order to optimize the overall performance of MANET communications when P2P applications and services are used. Both architectures share the same functionality such as decentralization, self-reorganization, and self-healing but differ in MANET routing protocol. Performance evaluation using the NS2 simulator shows that these architectures are suited to different scenarios namely increasing network size and peer velocity. Comparisons with other well-known solutions have proven their efficiency with regard to the above requirements.