An integrated approach for efficient routing and service discovery in mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Service discovery is an important problem in a self-configurable ad hoc network, where each mobile node is required to automatically discover and provide the available network services among themselves. Several protocols have been presented, with a goal of achieving efficient service discovery in mobile ad hoc networks. Basically, we have the same objective of developing an efficient protocol, but with an integrated approach. Our work is motivated by the observation that the current protocols mostly assume the existence of some routing protocols underneath, separated or loosely coupled from the service discovery protocol. We argue that, however, such an assumption clearly causes the problem of inefficiency because both protocols are based on a network-wide flooding mechanism, resulting in unnecessarily large number of redundant packet floods. In this paper, we propose a novel approach of integrating these two different but similar discovery protocols for services and routes. Our simulation results show that the proposed integrated scheme, named as HAID (hybrid adaptive protocol for integrated discovery), can reduce network overhead as well as end-to-end delay in mobile ad hoc networking environments.