A comprehensive service discovery solution for mobile ad hoc networks

Service discovery is an integral part of constructing self-configuring Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). While several service discovery protocols have been developed, most of them are designed for infrastructure-based networks and thus not suitable to be used in MANETs. Due the volatile nature of MANET, service discovery protocols designed for MANETs often suffer from problems. Firstly, they have limited scalability due to the extensive use of broadcast communication. Secondly, they usually lack context-aware selection mechanisms and feature only reduced interaction standards. This paper proposes a network layer supported comprehensive service discovery solution that addresses the above issues and provides a solution in two parts. First it discusses a location-aware network layer routing protocol that groups mobile nodes into clusters while a gateway in each cluster is responsible for routing. Secondly, this paper proposes a service discovery protocol that utilizes directories for service discovery that interact with lower network layer gateway configurations. In this architecture, gateways are also used as directories for service discovery to improve performance. In doing so, we improve the system's overall efficiency by eliminating the use of complex graph-based algorithms for maintaining clusters and establishing virtual backbones. Furthermore. this service discovery solution includes an agent-based context-aware service selection, and provides standard mechanisms for different types of service interaction.