The real Ad-hoc Multi-hop Peer-to-peer (RAMP) middleware: An easy-to-use support for spontaneous networking

Spontaneous (or opportunistic) networks are multi-hop ad-hoc networks where nodes opportunistically exploit peer-to-peer contacts to share content and available resources in an impromptu way. Even if spontaneous networking has recently received growing interest, there is still the lack of impactful and wide-scale applications fully exploiting its potential. We claim that this is due to the intrinsic complexity of spontaneous network management, unsuitable to be directly handled by application developers. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel easy-to-use middleware, called RAMP, for the autonomic, cross-, and application-layer management of spontaneous networks. RAMP enables the dynamic sharing of all resources available via multiple, heterogeneous, intermittent, infrastructure-based, and ad-hoc links, which are orchestrated in a lightweight way to compose the multi-hop paths needed by sharing applications at runtime. The RAMP prototype is a useful tool for the community of researchers in the field and can be rapidly deployed over real execution environments. The reported experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of our approach and the limited RAMP overhead over common deployment scenarios.