Opportunistic P2P Communications in Delay-Tolerant Rural Scenarios

Opportunistic communications represent a promising paradigm to support communicationnot only in situations where no infrastructure is in place, such as remote areas communications, but also where some nodes have high mobility leading to frequent disconnections.In opportunistic environments, we would like to make available all the applications thought for traditional wired and wireless networks like file sharing and content distribution.In this paper we present a delay tolerant scenario for file sharing applications in rural areas where an opportunistic approach is exploited.In order to support communications, we compare two peer-to-peer (P2P) schemes initially conceived for wireless networks and prove their applicability and usefulness to a DTN scenario where replication of resources can be used to improve the lookup performance and the network can be occasionally connected by means of a data mule.Simulation results show the suitability of the schemes and allow to derive interesting design guidelines on the convenience and applicability of such approaches.