MeshChord: A Location-Aware, Cross-Layer Specialization of Chord for Wireless Mesh Networks (concise contribution)

Wireless mesh networks are a promising area for the deployment of new wireless communication and networking technologies. In this paper, we address the problem of enabling effective peer-to-peer resource sharing in this type of networks. Starting from the well-known Chord protocol for resource sharing in wired networks, we propose a specialization (called MESHCHORD) that accounts for peculiar features of wireless mesh networks: namely, the availability of a wireless infrastructure, and the 1-hop broadcast nature of wireless communication. Through extensive packet-level simulations, we show that MESHCHORD reduces message overhead of as much as 40% with respect to the basic Chord design, while at the same time improving the information retrieval performance.