P2P overlay topology control in MANETs

P2P applications are enormously popular on the Internet and their uses vary from file sharing to Voice-over-IP to gaming and more. Increasingly, users are moving toward wireless networked devices and wish to continue using P2P applications in these new environments. MANETs are expected to grow in use as wireless mesh and 4G networks increase in popularity. P2P and MANETs share some similarities, such as self-organization, dynamism, and resilience to failure, but it is necessary that P2P algorithms should take advantage of the realities of MANETs. In P2P networks, the overlay peers must form a topology of connections between themselves and this topology should reflect the underlying network in order to reduce delay and energy consumption. We study the results of a game-theoretic topology control algorithm which considers energy and distance between nodes in a P2P network running atop a MANET. We find that the minimum cost topologies are very highly connected and thus resilient, but in most cases the topologies do not stabilize even without peer mobility or churn.