Scalable service discovery for MANET

Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) conveniently complement infrastructure-based networks, allowing mobile nodes to spontaneously form a network and share their services, including bridging with other networks, either infrastructure-based or ad hoc. However distributed service provisioning over MANETs requires adequate support for service discovery and invocation, due to the network's dynamics and resource constraints of wireless nodes. While a number of existing service discovery protocols have shown to be effective for the wireless environment, these are mainly aimed at infrastructure-based and/or 1-hop ad hoc wireless networks. Some discovery protocols for MANETs have been proposed over the last couple of years but they induce significant traffic overhead, and are thus primarily suited for small-scale MANETs with few nodes. Building upon the evaluation of existing protocols, we introduce a scalable service discovery protocol for MANETs, which is based on the homogeneous and dynamic deployment of cooperating directories within the network. Scalability of our protocol comes from the minimization of the generated traffic, and the use of compact directory summaries that enable to efficiently locate the directory that most likely caches the description of a given service.