Reliable Peer-To-Peer Resource Sharing In Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks are a fast developing area for new wireless communication and networking technologies.The design of efficient routing protocols for Mesh Network is challenging for several reasons: Physical network topology is random. Nodes have limited computation and memory capabilities. Energy and bisection bandwidth are scarce. Furthermore, in most settings, the lack of centralized components leaves all network control tasks to the nodes acting as decentralized peers. In this paper, we address the problem of reliable peer-to-peer resource sharing in wireless mesh networks. The well-known Chord protocol for resource sharing in wired networks, we propose a specialization that accounts for peculiar features of wireless mesh networks: namely, the availability of a wireless infrastructure, and the 1-hop broadcast nature of wireless communication, which bring to the notions of location awareness and MAC layer cross-layering. It also include the concept of simultaneous resource sharing in mesh networks. Through extensive packet level simulations, we investigate the separate effects of location awareness and MAC layer cross-layering, and of their combination, on the performance of the P2P application. The combined protocol, MESHCHORD, reduces message overhead of as much as 40 percent with respect to the basic Chord design, while at the same time improving the information retrieval performance. Notably, differently from the basic Chord design, our proposed MESHCHORD specialization displays information retrieval performance resilient to the presence of both CBR and TCP background traffic. Overall, the results of our study suggest that MESHCHORD can be successfully utilized for implementing file/resource sharing applications in wireless mesh networks. Keywords- Wireless mesh networks, community networks, distributed hash tables, peer-to-peer resource sharing, cross-layering