Towards efficient distributed service discovery in low-power and lossy networks

Low-power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) have been recognised as a promising technology to achieve ubiquity in the internet of things era. To realise this, service oriented architectures and the emerging IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN) standard are identified as key paradigms. One of the main elements to succeed any service oriented approach is a proficient service discovery protocol. In this paper, we propose EADP: an efficient protocol to announce and discover services in 6LoWPAN networks. EADP adopts a fully distributed approach using an adaptive push-pull model to ensure fast discovery times, low energy consumption and low generated overhead with timely reaction to network dynamics. EADP achieves this by using context-awareness information, delivered by a trickle algorithm. EADP was implemented and evaluated in Contiki using the Cooja simulator. Simulation results show EADP's capability to realise fast discovery times with low cost in terms of energy and overhead. These achievements make EADP very suitable for pervasive LLN applications.