Efficient and Resilient Overlay Topologies over Ad Hoc Networks

We discuss what kind of overlay topology should be pro-actively built before an overlay routing protocol enters a route search process on top of it. The basic overlay structures we study are the K-Nearest Neighbours overlay topologies, connecting every overlay node to its K nearest peers. We introduce a family of optimizations, based on a pruning rule. As flooding is a key component of many route discovery mechanisms in MANETs, our performance study focusses on the delivery percentage, bandwidth consumption and time duration of flooding on the overlay. We also consider the overlay path stretch and the overlay nodes degree as respective indicators for the data transfer transmission time and overlay resilience. We finally recommend to optimize the K-Nearest Neighbours overlay topologies with the most selective pruning rule and, if necessary, to set a minimal bound on the overlay node degree for improving resilience.