P2P common API for structured overlay networks: a cross-layer extension

Several structured p2p systems exist in literature and many applications have been developed on top of them. To use these applications on top of different overlays without changing their implementations, a common API was proposed in. However, since that specification is meagre, current implementations of structured p2p systems have customized it reducing the portability of applications. In addition, in mobile environments, the possibility to exploit cross-layer interactions considerably improves overall performace. In fact, a cross-layer p2p system, called CrossROAD, has been recently designed to optimize structured overlays on MANETs. It directly interacts with a proactive routing protocol, and it can provide cross-layer information to upper-layer applications to further optimize their behavior. In this paper we propose a cross-layer extension of the common API pointing out advantages of the cross-layer approach even at the application layer