Asian Institute of Technology

8. Abstract: In an ad hoc network topology with large number of nodes and traffic flows prevalent, currently existing protocols such as DSR and OLSR cannot perform well. Due to the lack of location information, the data packets have to be flooded in the whole network to find the destination. This introduces unnecessary traffic overhead in the system, exhibiting low packet delivery and low throughput which clearly demands for a scalable routing protocol. In response to these requirements, it is argued that peerto-peer architectures like distributed hash tables (DHT) can be adopted as a scalable substrate to provide location-independent node identification and helps to decouple the identification with the physical address of the node. Thus an indirect routing system that offers a powerful and flexible communication abstraction can be implemented. However, along with the increase in scalability, this integration also introduces new challenges for the network architecture specification. In this thesis, we inspect the design issues related to DHT implementation in ad hoc networks. We make a survey of different proposals in the field and discuss the way in which DHT functionalities can be applied. Finally, based on our study, we propose and implement an algorithm for DHT integration and analyze the results compared to existing protocols. We implement pastry based DHT algorithm in popular reactive routing protocol, DSR in the network layer to implement prefix based route requesting instead of conventional flooding based route requesting. This highly reduces the control traffic overhead in large network thus showing better packet delivery and good throughput.