MASD: Mobile Agent Based Service Discovery in Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Service discovery is an integral part of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). While several service discovery protocols such as Service Location Protocol [1] and Universal Plug and Play (UPnP)[2] have been developed, most of them are designed for infrastructure based networks and thus not suitable to be used in MANETs. This paper proposes Mobile Agent Based Service Discovery (MASD) for Ad Hoc network. It is a policy driven agent based mechanism that facilitates cross platform service discovery in ad-hoc environments. The various agents are chosen in MASD which executes the predefined policies. Our approach achieves a high degree of flexibility in adapting itself to changes in ad-hoc environments and is aware of common problems associated with structured compound formation in mobile Ad Hoc environments. Mechanism consists of grouping mobile nodes into clusters while a gateway in each cluster is responsible for routing. We evaluated the performance of the scheme by running simulations on Glomosim simulator. Also the motion of agents is taken care of by PMADE (Platform for Mobile Agent Distribution and Execution).The results obtained shows that MASD is quite effective for successful service discovery in MANETs.