KELOP: distributed key-value lookup in wireless ad hoc networks

It is critical to discover and utilized shared services and resources in wireless ad hoc networks. While wireline networks can use domain name system (DNS) to perform such key-value lookups, designing scalable key-value lookup protocols with high success rates and low message overhead in the dynamic topologies of wireless ad hoc networks presents a nontrivial challenge. In this paper, we present KELOP, a key-value lookup protocol for wireless ad hoc networks. KELOP is a fully distributed best-effort protocol that relies only on the local information stored at each node to locate the closest estimates of the target. This strategy results in remarkably low control-message overhead. Simulation results show that, in addition to low message overhead, KELOP is able to provide lookup success rate close to 100% in most cases.