We are experiencing a revolution in the wireless technology and mobile phone networks as they are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. On the other hand, there is another trend, gaining extreme popularity over the traditional wired Internet: Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking. Specifically, Distributed Hash Table ( DHT) based Structured P2P overlay networks are capable to facilitate information storage and retrieval among a potentially very large number of users without the use of central server

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... nts. Providing such P2P services in mobile networks will allow a user to harness the potential of P2P services while on the move. However, due to technical issues in mobile phone networks and limited resources available on the handsets, designing such a system is a challenging issue. While the research of P2P overlays in wired networks is plenty, there is a limited study on the suitability of different existing P2P overlays for mobile networks. This article investigates the performance and efficiency of a number of structured P2P overlays that use recursive approach for routing strategy: R/Kademlia, Pastry and Bamboo and finds their suitability for use on mobile networks. The simulation result shows that among the three overlays, Bamboo exhibits a marginally better performance in comparison to the others with a 98% to 99% routing efficiency and a lower bandwidth consumption in high churn environment. Hence, Bamboo protocol is a good choice to be used over Kademlia and Pastry in mobile networks.