Towards DHT-based P2P resource sharing over hybrid infrastructure of wireless mesh network and mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

With the sudden proliferation in the usage of mobile devices, the demand for Internet connectivity is increasing at a fast rate. The public places like the university campuses, railway stations, airports and shopping malls, etc. are facing the challenge of providing uninterrupted Internet connectivity. Wireless mesh network (WMN) presents themself as an elegant alternative for this purpose. These networks exhibit self-organization, self-healing and self-maintenance capabilities. Further, they have less procurement cost and are robust. Also, the mobile devices which are equipped with wireless interfaces can form their own mobile ad hoc network (MANET) which can act as an extension of wireless mesh backbone. This enables to extend the reachability of WMN towards dead zones having no wireless network coverage. In this paper, we propose an approach to combine MANET and WMN. The combination of two types of wireless networks forms the underlay for deploying structured Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications for resource sharing among the nodes. We have outlined the challenges and propose some possible solutions. Simulation results suggest the applicability of our approach.