Title: A new approach to service discovery in wireless mobile ad hoc networks

Authors: Hossam Hassanein, Yu Yang, Afzal Mawji

Addresses: Telecommunications Research Lab, School of Computing, Queen's University, Canada. ' Telecommunications Research Lab, School of Computing, Queen's University, Canada. ' Telecommunications Research Lab, School of Computing, Queen's University, Canada

Abstract: Service discovery is essential for many wireless applications, yet it is more difficult to achieve in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETS) than in both wired and traditional wireless networks due to the lack of central control. In addition, the heterogeneity, mobility and limited energy of the mobile devices precludes the use of traditional service discovery protocols. This paper presents HESED, a fundamentally different service discovery protocol based on multicast query and multicast reply. Clients multicast service queries and matching servers multicast their response to all nodes. The service information is cached by all and may be used in place of future queries. HESED also eliminates the effect of asymmetric links, providing reliability for its forwarding algorithms. The packet complexity of HESED is shown to be O(N) for N-node MANETs, as opposed to O(N²) for traditional service discovery schemes. Simulation results show that HESED significantly outperforms a Traditional On-demand Service Discovery (TOSD) algorithm.

Keywords: service discovery; mobile ad hoc networks; MANETs; wireless networks; cross-layer; multicast; simulation; prototype; mobile networks; sensor networks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2007.012992

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2007 Vol.2 No.1/2, pp.135 - 145

Published online: 02 Apr 2007 *

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