P2P-Based Instant Messaging for Wireless Community Networks

With remarkable advances in wireless communications and mobile devices, wireless community networks (WCNs) become more and more attractive. Plenty of applications have been developed. Among others, instant messaging (IM) can be used for real time communications in a community network. In a wireless community network, nodes may spontaneously join or leave from time to time. In this paper, to meet the self-organization requirement of the wireless community network, peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm is adopted to support IM applications. Traditionally, IM systems have been developed based on the client-server model for networking. To remedy the inherent deficiencies of the client-server model, this research probes the prospects of using P2P networking paradigm in the mobile IM applications for wireless community networks. Especially, due to the limitations of the mobile devices and wireless communications, related issues have to been reconsidered. In our design, the load on the mobile peers can be greatly reduced with the help of the powerful super peers. Besides, a message filtering mechanism is developed to lessen the message load of peer discovery in the P2P system. As will be shown in the simulation results, the methods proposed in this paper can remarkably reduce the message load of peer discovery to effectively support P2P based instant messaging in the wireless community networks.