On Location-Awareness in P2P Wireless Mesh Community Networks

Peer-to-Peer networks, due to their capacity of providing a good substrate for large scale contents-resources sharing and distribution applications, represent an interesting and promiscuous research area of the ICT and could play a key role in the diffusion of the mesh networking paradigm, meeting the growing need of communication and resource sharing among people anywhere and anytime. Extending the P2P paradigm to wireless networks presents several difficulties due to their dynamic, multi hop and often power and computational constrained nature. We provide some fundamental guidelines in designing P2P overlay schemes for WMCNs, reaching the conclusion that a hierarchical, structured, and distributed-hash-table (DHT) based architecture, exploiting location-awareness, could represent a suitable solution able to guarantee high resilience, fault tolerance, flexibility and scalability, at the cost of supporting a moderate overhead for overlay and nodes' churning management. We studied and evaluated a location-aware DHT-based P2P scheme, called Georoy. We also introduced some improvements allowing its applicability to wireless mesh networks and opportunistic rural scenarios.