Internet Connectivity Sharing in Multi-path Spontaneous Networks: Comparing and Integrating Network- and Application-Layer Approaches

Spontaneous networking, where wireless mobile nodes opportunistically exploit multi-hop ad-hoc paths toward peers to share content and available resources in an impromptu way, has recently received growing interest from both industry and academia. In this paper, we specifically focus on the notable case of sharing connectivity to the traditional Internet, with the general goal of an overall better exploitation of connectivity resources, often underutilized as the population of wireless devices grows, as well as their local computing/ memory/bandwidth resources. In particular, here we show how our novel middleware, called RAMP, can exploit both network- and application-layer solutions to dynamically manage mission-oriented paths toward peers offering Internet connectivity. Thanks to our middleware-level cross-layer approach, RAMP can dynamically select and combine different solutions for multi-hop multi-path ad-hoc path formation and can take proper management decisions based on run-time context. The reported results demonstrate the suitability of dynamically integrating network- and application-layer approaches to achieve the best overhead/performance tradeoff depending on specific application requirements.