Efficient Search and Topology Adaptation in Mobile Peer-to-Peer Networks

Abstract

With the rapid development of wireless technology, more and more people use handheld devices to enjoy their mobility. A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) consists of only mobile devices to share information without any predefined infrastructure. These devices are intrinsically constrained by limited battery capacity, low communication bandwidth, and short transmission range. How to share information efficiently on MANETs is an interesting topic. Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are another research area that has gained a lot of attention these days, and many different kinds of architectures have been proposed. However, most of these research results only focused on the wired networks. Since P2P networks and MANET have some common characteristics, it is appealing to apply P2P file sharing onto MANETs. In this work, we propose a new file search and topology adaptation mechanism to make file sharing on MANETs more efficient. We use the neighboring regions to solve the null region problem and design rules for dynamically adjusting the scope of the network to closely match the physical network topology. Simulation results showed that our proposed file search mechanism could achieve excellent performance on MANETs.