Service Composition in Opportunistic Networks: A Load and Mobility Aware Solution

Pervasive networks formed by users' mobile devices have the potential to exploit a rich set of distributed service components that can be composed to provide each user with a multitude of application level services. However, in many challenging scenarios, opportunistic networking techniques are required to enable communication as devices suffer from intermittent connectivity, disconnections and partitions. This poses novel challenges to service composition techniques. While several works have discussed middleware and architectures for service composition in well-connected wired networks and in stable MANET environments, the underlying mechanism for selecting and forwarding service requests in the significantly challenging networking environment of opportunistic networks has not been entirely addressed. The problem comprises three stages: i) selecting an appropriate service sequence set out of available services to obtain the required application level service; ii) routing results of a previous stage in the composition to the next one through a multi-hop opportunistic path; and iii) routing final service outcomes back to the requester. The proposed algorithm derives efficiency and effectiveness by taking into account the estimated load at service providers and expected time to opportunistically route information between devices. Based on this information the algorithm estimates the best composition to obtain a required service. It is shown that using only local knowledge collected in a distributed manner, performance close to a real-time centralized system can be achieved. Applicability and performance guarantee of the service composition algorithm in a range of mobility characteristics are established through extensive simulations on real/synthetic traces.