Performance Evaluation of Structured P2P over Wireless Multi-hop Networks

Internet connected wireless multi-hop networks are an interesting alternative for providing broadband wireless access. In order for the network to be transparent, the same services need to be available as in standard infrastructure wireless deployments. However, there is a significant challenge in providing services such as authentication, name resolution, VoIP over multi-hop mesh networks as dedicated servers implementing those services might be not available. Therefore, deploying overlay networks in the mesh to decentralize those services and move towards a Peer-to-Peer paradigm is an interesting approach. However, the multi-hop nature of wireless mesh networks and the restrictions in resource availability might cause problems when deploying overlay networks on top of such environments. In this paper, we investigate the overhead and trade-offs when deploying a structured overlay solution such as the Bamboo DHT over wireless multi-hop mesh networks. We provide various simulation results characterizing the overhead of management and control traffic and give recommendations for performance improvement.