Performance Evaluation of a DHT-based Approach to Resource Discovery in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Recently, approaches to DHT-style key-based routing explicitly designed for the use in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have been proposed. However, as DHTs are usually no applications as such, a very practical distributed application running on top of such mobile DHTs could be resource discovery. Therefore, in this paper, a DHT-based approach to resource discovery – MAPNaS – will be described in detail and thoroughly evaluated through simulations. We aim at gaining a first insight into the question under which network conditions it is meaningful to perform DHT-based resource discovery and when it would be more advisable to opt for a less complex – e.g. a simple broadcast-based – approach instead. Index Terms – DHT, MANETs, Peer-to-Peer, Service discovery