Towards reliable peer-to-peer data sharing over mobile ad hoc networks

This paper presents a reliable communication method for assuring stable peer-to-peer (P2P) data sharing in mobile ad hoc networks. The method for guaranteeing reliable P2P data sharing mainly tackles the problem of disconnection due to the sudden disappearance of one or more nodes involved in the active transmission route. We propose a communication mechanism which includes two schemes; a configuration scheme and a routing scheme. The configuration scheme discovers mobile devices and automatically constructs a MANET (mobile ad hoc network) using a dynamic IP addressing technique. The routing scheme allows for reliable transmission of data via mobile devices. It does this using our reconnection mechanism that finds emergency routes in instances of abrupt disconnection. We developed a reliable mobile P2P data sharing system with these two schemes. We also performed some experiments for verifying our communication method for stable transmission using our real testbed. The experiments lead us to conclude that our communication method is effective and assures reliable P2P data sharing over mobile ad hoc networks. Our reconnection mechanism affords a good ratio of successful transfers for services requested by users. In addition, our system minimizes the number of relayed transmissions using our scanning table and lookup table. This provides a good transmission performance and reliability, but our system takes a relatively long time for discovery.