ABSTRACT
Since flat networks do not scale, it is a time-honored strategy to overlay a virtual infrastructure on a physical network. There are, essentially, two approaches to doing this. The first approach is protocoldriven and involves crafting a virtual infrastructure in support of whatever protocol happens to be of immediate interest. While the resulting virtual infrastructure is likely to serve the protocol well, more often than not, the infrastructure is not useful for other purposes. This is unfortunate, as its consequence is that a new infrastructure has to be invented and installed from scratch for each individual protocol in a given suite. In bandwidth-constraint Mobile Adhoc NETworks (MANET), maintaining different virtual infrastructures for different protocols may involve excessive overhead. The alternate approach is to design the virtual infrastructure with no particular protocol in mind. The challenge, of course, is to design the virtual infrastructure in such a way that it can be leveraged by a multitude of different protocols. Such a virtual infrastructure is called general-purpose as opposed to special-purpose if it is designed in support of just one protocol. The benefits of a general-purpose virtual infrastructure are obvious.
