MAPNaS: a lightweight, locality-aware peer-to-peer based name service for MANETs

Name services for mobile ad hoc networks are essential to discover and bind resources given by their name or URI to a specific network address. As there is no fixed infrastructure available in MANETs, nodes cannot rely on any DNS-like system as is taken for granted in the Internet. To keep up with the dynamicity of MANETs, a name service needs to be flexible and scalable. For this purpose, we propose MAPNaS (mobile ad-hoc peer-to-peer name service), a lightweight and locality-aware peer-to-peer based name service. MAPNaS runs on top of MADPastry (T. Zhan and J. Schiller, June 2005), a general-purpose DHT substrate especially designed for MANETs. Through simulation we compare the performance of MAPNaS - both in terms of the success rate and overall network traffic - against an unstructured, broadcast-based reference approach. We thereby demonstrate how to efficiently build a peer-to-peer based name service in mobile ad hoc networks