On the comparison between performance of DHT-based protocols for opportunistic networks

Opportunistic networks represent a new frontier for networking research as due to node mobility the network might become disconnected. Such intermittent connectivity imposes challenges to protocol design, especially when information access might require the availability of updated information about resources shared by mobile nodes. An opportunistic network can be seen as a peer-to-peer network where resources should be located in a distributed way. Numerous solutions for P2P resource management have been proposed in the last years. Among the different approaches being considered, Distributed Hash Table (DHT) based schemes offer the advantages of a distributed approach which can be tuned to network scalability. In this paper we consider two well known P2P DHT-based solutions for wireless networks denoted as Bamboo and Georoy, and compare their performance in a multihop wireless scenario. We evaluate scalability and key lookup behavior for different network sizes. The results allow us to gain insights into protocol behavior which allows to select for a given network configuration the appropriate scheme.