Performance Evaluation of the Mobile Peer-to-Peer Protocol

The utilization of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks on mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) introduces new services and possibilities such as context based routing and location based services (LBS). A simple layering of both networks is inefficient and does not scale well because the virtual P2P overlay network does not match the frequently changing physical network topology of the MANET. The Mobile Peer-to-Peer (MPP) protocol stack offers a very promising concept by introducing a cross-layer communication channel between the physical network layer and the virtual P2P network layer. This reduces significantly the messaging overhead and increases the search success rate, as we can prove in this work. Therefore we describe an implementation of the MPP protocol stack in the Network Simulator 2 (ns-2). With this implementation we prove the significant performance improvements which can be achieved with MPP, to allow P2P networking in mobile ad hoc environments. Keywords— overlay networks, content based routing, location based services, cross layer communication, Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, Peer-to-Peer