Every node is born equal: attacking preferential attachment in peer-to-peer mobile multihop networks

A mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) network must guarantee a balanced utilization of the equal-capacity nodes; otherwise it may result in early death of overloaded nodes due to their battery exhaustion. It not only means a discontinuation of certain services offered by them but also causes other services to be disconnected. This is because every node plays an important role as a router in multihop mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) by participating in a routing protocol to decide the route as well as to forward packets on other nodes´ behalf. However, it is observed that mobile nodes in a MANET do not undertake the role of packet forwarding responsibility uniformly. This non-uniformity may incur numerous troubles in the network mostly related to over-dependence of routing functionality on the influential nodes. For example, those influential nodes can be easily exhausted their battery power than ordinary nodes. Anomaly in routing performance which was found but not explained in a number of previous studies is also due to this non-uniformity. This paper defines role number of a node as a measure of the extent to which the node lies on the paths between others, shows the role number distribution in a MANET, investigates why it happens with two most popular routing protocols, dynamic source routing (DSR) and ad-hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV), and poses an open question on how to produce a network with equal responsibility.