Evaluation of service discovery architectures for mobile ad hoc networks

Discovery of services and other named resources is expected to be a crucial feature for the usability of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Different types of service discovery architectures are distinguished by the extent that service coordinators (SCs) are implemented in the network. SCs are nodes that hold a central repository for the caching of service attributes and bindings of servers located in its neighborhood. This paper describes and investigates the performance of different architectures in terms of service availability, messaging overhead and latency. The architectures are analyzed and evaluated based on a large range of parameters. The paper also shows that in an on-demand MANET, where the service discovery mechanism will have a direct impact on the reactive routing protocol, the routing effects influence the evaluation result. It also demonstrates the benefits of combining the service discovery with route discovery, especially in on-demand MANETs where reactive routing protocols are being used.