On the performance of ad hoc routing protocols under a peer-to-peer application

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and peer-to-peer (P2P) applications are emerging technologies based on the same paradigm: the P2P paradigm. Motivated, respectively, by the necessity of executing applications in environments with no previous infra-structure and the demand for applications that share files or distribute processing through the Internet, MANETs and P2P applications have received some interest from research community. As a characteristic of the distributed model, which they follow, such technologies face a difficult task of routing requests in a decentralized environment. In this paper, we conducted a detailed study of a Gnutella-like application running over a MANET where three different protocols were considered. The results show that each protocol that were analyzed performed well in under some conditions and for some metrics, while had drawbacks in others.