An integrated approach for P2P file sharing on multi-hop wireless networks

P2P file sharing protocol and ad hoc wireless routing protocol share many intriguing similarities even though they are motivated on totally different basis. The goal of P2P file sharing system such as KaZaa is to locate a set of servers that contain a given file and disseminate it efficiently. The key problem of an ad hoc network routing protocol is to determine which route to take to reach a given remote host. P2P file sharing application on mobile ad hoc network (MANET) has gained more momentum as shown in the research of recent years. One natural way is to implement P2P application and ad hoc routing at different layers they belong to. In this paper, we argue that instead of stacking one on the top of the other, more work needs to be done to make both P2P file sharing protocol and MANET routing protocol interact with each other. We extract the commonalities of these two and design a common query/response framework on which ad hoc network routing and P2P file sharing are integrated seamlessly. The extensive experiments show that our strategy performs better than the layered approach in terms of traffic, average delay and packet delivery ratio.