An Analysis of the Overhead and Energy Consumption in Flooding, Random Walk and Gossip based Resource Discovery Protocols in MP2P Networks

All major mobile communication architectures are mainly centralized. When the mobile devices are switched on it will search for nearby base station or access point. The content being searched is mostly stored in a centralized directory manner. Peer-to-Peer platform can be one of the best possibilities to overcome the restrictions and resolve issues incurred due to centralization. Mobile environment poses additional challenges on such P2P networks - due to limited resources, dynamic and wireless network characteristics, heterogeneity of nodes, limitations on processing power and wireless bandwidth. Hence resource discovery becomes further challenging. Even today mostly the traditional methods like flooding, random walk or gossip based forwarding methods have to be considered along with major limitations and drawbacks. Further in Mobile Peer-to-Peer (MP2P) system the energy aspect is very crucial with regards to the participation of nodes in the system. The search failure rate may increase if a mobile device uses all its energy and hence not participate in the resource discovery process. In this paper, we simulate the existing standard flooding, random walk and gossip based resource discovery algorithms on a P2P Mobile Adhoc Network (MANET) and studied their performance under such highly dynamic mobile network scenario. The efficiency of the resource discovery protocols are validated through extensive NS-2 simulations.