P2P MANET's - New Research Issues

1. What are P2P MANETs? A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes that dynamically self organize in a wireless network without using any pre-existing infrastructure. In a MANET, the applications are typically “peer-to-peer” rather than “client-server”. Moreover, a MANET is often built to support a specific application, thus the networking is application-driven. For these reasons, we often refer to the ad hoc networking done in a MANET as peer-to-peer (P2P) networking. This however is not quite consistent with the general meaning of P2P in the broader Internet context. In the Internet, a P2P network is basically an overlay network justified by the need for specialized functions that are not possible (or not cost-effective) in the IP layer. These functions must be performed at the middleware or application layer. Classic examples of Internet overlay networks are: real time multicast overlays (which overcome the lack for multicast support in the IP routers), unstructured P2P systems such as Gnutella [Gnu], BitTorrent [PG+05], and KaZaA [Sha], and; structured P2P systems such as Pastry [RD01], Chord [SM+01], and CAN [RF+01]. Structured P2P overlays are typically implemented as content addressable networks and permit efficient “content” based routing, which is otherwise not possible in the IP layer.