Performance Evaluation of Structured Peer-to-Peer Overlays for Use on Mobile Networks

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay networks are typically deployed on fixed wired networks. Distributed Hash Table (DHT) based structured P2P overlay networks offer scalability, fault tolerance and a self-managing infrastructure which does not exhibit single points of failure. Deploying DHT based overlays on mobile networks is a natural next step to make DHT based systems more widely available. However, supporting P2P on mobile networks poses a number of challenges, such as restrictions in terms of data transmissions on cellular networks, limited battery power of the handsets, high levels of churn due to variations in signal strength and placing or receiving voice calls which suspend the data link. While comparative studies of overlay algorithms for wired networks have been reported, there are a very few studies on the suitability of different existing DHT based overlays for mobile networks. This paper evaluates the performance and efficiency of five popular DHT based structured P2P overlays: Chord, Pastry, Kademlia, Broose and EpiChord, taking into account the conditions as seen in mobile networks. Our experimentation has shown that Kademlia and EpiChord are good candidates for use in high churn mobile environments.