DHT-based unicast for mobile ad hoc networks

As mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) become ever more popular, it also becomes more and more interesting to build distributed network applications (e.g. data storage, etc.) that have been successfully built using DHTs on the Internet in such MANETs. For this purpose, DHT substrates especially designed for the use in MANETs have been recently proposed. In this paper, we demonstrate that such a DHT substrate (MADPastry) can be efficiently used to not only provide indirect, key-based overlay routing, but also conventional direct unicasting. Our simulation results show that DHT-based unicasting can markedly outperform conventional reactive ad hoc routing (AODV) as well as proactive ad hoc routing (OLSR). Therefore, MANET nodes that are already running a DHT substrate for application purposes will no longer have to maintain a separate ad hoc routing protocol in parallel but can use their DHT substrate for conventional point-to-point ad hoc routing as well