A meta service description assisted service discovery protocol for MANETs

The ability to discover services offered in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) is the major prerequisite for effectively utilizing these services. Caching service advertisements is an essential component in service discovery protocols for MANETs. To fully utilize the advantage of the cached service advertisements, the cached service description can be advertised with the local service description in a vicinity, which however will increase packet size. To reduce packet size, a better solution is to representing the cached service advertisements with a meta service description. In this paper, we introduce a fine-grained group-based meta service description scheme and propose an efficient service discovery protocol: Meta Service Description Assisted Service Discovery Protocol (MSDASDP) for MANETs, where the number of forwarding nodes of request packets is minimized with the help of the fine-grained meta service description. Simulation results both show that MSDASDP is an effective, efficient, and prompt service discovery protocol for MANETs.