Design and evaluation of a peer-to-peer MANET crosslayer approach: OneHopOverlay4MANET

Peer-to-Peer overlay networks can be deployed over Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) to address content discovery issues. However, previous research has shown that deploying P2P systems straight over MANET do not exhibit satisfactory performance. Bandwidth limitation, limited resources and node mobility are some of the key constraints. OneHopOverlay4MANET exploits the synergies between MANET and P2P overlays through cross-layering. It combines Distributed Hash Table (DHT) based structured P2P overlays with MANET underlay routing protocols to achieve one logical hop between any pair of overlay nodes. In this paper, we present OneHopOverlay4MANET and evaluate its performance when combined with different underlay routing protocols. We evaluate OneHopOverlay4MANET with two proactive underlay (OLSR and BATMAN) and with three reactive underlay routing protocols (DSR, AODV and DYMO). Through simulation we show that the use of OLSR in OneHopOverlay4MANET yields the best performance. In addition, we compare the performance of the proposed system over OLSR to two recent structured P2P over MANET systems (MA-SP2P and E-SP2P) that adopted OLSR as the routing protocol. As simulation result shows, better performance can be achieved using OneHopOverlay4MANET