Overlay Construction in Mobile Peer-to-Peer Networks

Abstract

With the evolution of wireless technologies, mobile networks can provide much more interesting services and resources to users than before. Consequently storing, sharing and delivering resources efficiently have become popular topics in the field of mobile networks. Mobile Peer-to-Peer (the authors use mobile P2P for short hereinafter) networks, which are inspired by the great success of P2P networks, have been proposed to efficiently share the network resources among the peers in mobile networks. However, due to the characteristics of mobile networks and stringent constraints of applications, it is fairly difficult to construct mobile P2P networks. In this chapter, the authors present a survey of overlay construction in mobile P2P networks. First, they outline the design issues of running P2P networks on top of mobile networks. The authors then present a survey of existing overlay construction techniques for mobile P2P networks. They highlight the advantages and disadvantages of various overlay construction techniques for mobile P2P networks and further compare these methods. They also point out the open research issues in each sub-area and conclude with possible future research directions in mobile P2P overlay construction.