An inexpensive unstructured platform for wireless mobile peer-to-peer networks

In this paper, we propose an unstructured platform, namely Inexpensive Peer-to-Peer Subsystem (IPPS), for wireless mobile peer-to-peer networks. The platform addresses the constraints of expensive bandwidth of wireless medium, and limited memory and computing power of mobile devices. It uses a computationally-, memory requirement-and communication-wise inexpensive gossip protocol as the main maintenance operation, and exploits location information of the wireless nodes to minimize the number of link-level messages for communication between peers. As a result, the platform is not only lightweight by itself, but also provides a low cost framework for different peer-to-peer applications. In addition, further enhancements are introduced to enrich the platform with robustness and tolerance to failures without incurring any additional computational and memory complexity, and communication between peers. In specific, we propose schemes for a peer (1) to chose a partner for a gossip iteration, (2) to maintain the neighbors, and (3) to leave the peer-to-peer network. Simulation results are given to demonstrate the performance of the platform.