SMF: A Novel Lightweight Reliable Service Discovery Approach in MANET

Service-oriented architecture is an important way for collaboration in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Yet, since MANETs are infrastructure-less, the traditional service discovery approaches will produces large amount of broadcast request packets which may cause a broadcast storm. In addition, due to the dynamic network topology and limited energy of mobile devices, the invocation of services that are discovered by the traditional approaches has a high possibility of failure in MANETs. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight reliable service discovery approach based on the concept of Service Magnetic Field (SMF), and a cross-layer implementation, which integrates the SMF and AODV routing protocol. In SMF, the service consumer node will find more reliable service providers by feeling the service strength generated by the service provider. SMF also provides directional information for the service discovery, which reduces the amount of broadcast packets. Experiment results show that our approach is more efficient.