A novel path selection and recovery mechanism for MANETs P2P file sharing applications

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc networks (MANETS) is becoming an important area of research nowadays because of the constantly escalating demands from consumers to go mobile and the need to share contents between users. Current P2P file sharing protocols for MANETs use either aggressive or reactive flooding techniques for their path selection and recovery. Both techniques represent extreme measures to deal with path failures and they either do too much or very little work in response to path failures. In this paper we present a new path selection and recovery mechanism (Reactive with Unicast Probing Messages) that is a balance between the above two techniques in terms of its control overhead and the resulting path quality. By introducing a new unicast messaging mechanism to the reactive flooding technique, a requesting node can probe its set of available paths for their roundtrip times and use the best one for its file transfer. Our new technique is based on unicast messaging which proves to be effective and requires low control overhead as per the results of our simulations.