Evaluation of ad-hoc routing protocols under a peer-to-peer application

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and peer-to-peer (P2P) applications are emerging technologies based on the same paradigm: the peer-to-peer paradigm. Motivated, respectively, by the necessity of executing applications in environments with no previous infra-structure and the demand for applications that share, in a satisfying manner, files through the Internet, MANETs and P2P applications have brought onto themselves some interest from the community. As a characteristic of the distributed model which they follow, such technologies face a difficult task of routing requests in a decentralized environment. In this paper, we conducted a detailed study of a Gnutella-like application running over a mobile ad-hoc network where three different protocols were considered. The results show that each of the protocols analyzed performed well in some scenarios for some metrics yet had drawbacks in others.