Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) have recently attracted a lot of attention in the research community as well as in industry. Although the previous research mainly focused on the various problems of MANET in data link and network layers, we consider, in this paper, how to efficiently support applications such as service discovery on top of MANET. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay network can be adopt to service discovery mechanism because P2P and MANET share certain similarities, primarily the fact that both are instances of self-organizing decentralized systems. Especially, distributed hash table (DHT) systems used to P2P overlay network can be effective in reducing the communication overhead in service discovery. However, since overlay network is independent of physical network topology and existing topology-aware mechanisms are based on wired network, they are inefficient in MANET.
We propose a proximity-based overlay network routing to overcome the inefficiency of routing in overlay network. In the proximity-based overlay network routing, each node collects information of physically close nodes by using one hop broadcast and routes messages to the logically closest node to destination. In a detailed ns-2 simulation study, we show that the proximity-based overlay network routing reduces the number of physical hops comparable to the flooding-based mechanism with low communication overhead. We also find that the proposed scheme works well in the mobile environment.
