MADPastry: A DHT Substrate for Practicably Sized MANETs
Thomas Zahn, Jochen Schiller · 2005
Abstract–As mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) become ever more popular, it also becomes more and more interesting to build distributed network applications that one is accustomed to from the Internet on top of MANETs. In the Internet, Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) have recently proven themselves an efficient building block for such distributed applications. However, DHTs are ill-suited for direct deployment in MANETs as they are largely oblivious of the physical routing. Therefore, we propose MADPastry, a DHT substrate explicitly designed for the use in MANETs. MADPastry considers physical locality and integrates the functionality of a DHT and an ad hoc routing protocol at the network layer to provide an efficient indirect routing primitive in MANETs. To answer the fundamental question whether the extra overhead of maintaining a DHT in MANETs is really worth the effort or, instead, one would be better off broadcasting the actual lookups in the first place, we compare MADPastry's performance against an unstructured Gnutella-style broadcast agent and a DHT substrate without locality awareness. I.