APSALAR

Abstract

Current solutions to communication in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are based on the use of IP addresses. These approaches identify the nodes involved in data transmission through the same type of address used in traditional wired networks.However, IP addresses do not carry the same meaning in MANETs as in wired networks, where routing protocols can reduce the routing effort based on the assumption that stub networks are physically static. In MANETs, where currently similar routing protocols are used to determine routes to individual nodes, IP addresses as a basis for routing decisions represent a poor choice, because nodes in these networks are assumed to be highly mobile.We argue that a structured Peer-to-Peer (P2P) protocol that is aware of the proximity between nodes represents a viable alternative to IP in MANETs. Our approach replaces IP ad- dresses in favour of a service-oriented structured P2P identifiers that exploits a node's proximity-awareness in order to form physically-close clusters. In this paper, we describe the design of our routing protocol, called APSALAR, and discuss its features in comparison to existing approaches.