A Cross-Layer Approach towards Robustness of Mobile Peer-to-Peer Networks

The lookup mechanism used to locate services in Peer-to-Peer systems can be attacked with little effort due to its decentralized and self-organizing nature. Security mechanisms aiming at rendering the lookup mechanism more robust mostly require a high amount of network resources. These mechanisms cannot be applied without adaptations when network resources are limited. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to increase lookup robustness in mobile Peer-to-Peer networks. Here, network resources are limited by the mobile ad hoc network that is used as communication substrate. Our approach harnesses cross-layer information provided from the mobile ad hoc underlay to the Peer-to-Peer overlay. We derive analytical models to compare our approach to existing security mechanisms and validate our results by means of simulation. Our core findings how that our approach consumes less resources than existing mechanisms while the robustness remains at a comparable level.