Solving the User-to-Host Binding Problem in ad hoc Networks through Photo-IDs

The practical use of a name as a more user-friendly abstraction of a machine's numerical address on a network is quite old. In fact, the basic functionality of the DNS (Domain Name System) service consists of translating hostnames into IP addresses. In this paper we present Visual DNS, which is an extension to the DNS service that meets the requirements of MANET environments. Visual DNS allows any node in the network to discover any other node in a transparent manner, and independently of its location. The proposed application makes use of a distributed user discovery protocol based on reliable data dissemination to share information about users. Information shared includes the user name and photo, along with the host's IP address, among other things. Once the discovery protocol starts, the application offers users the possibility to communicate with other known users through either a text based chat application, a VoIP session or a videoconference session. We present the architecture of the proposed application, along with some implementation details. Finally, experimental results show that, if properly tuned, the proposed data dissemination strategy allows user information to reach all the nodes in a MANET in just a few seconds