NanoSD: A Flexible Service Discovery Protocol for Dynamic and Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

A wide-spread integration of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) into daily life applications demands modular and flexible service oriented architectures. Discovering nodes and their services is imperative to any large-scale sensor network deployment. In this paper, we describe nanoSD, a lightweight service discovery protocol, designed for highly dynamic, mobile and heterogeneous sensor networks. We demonstrate through a fully functional implementation and its performance evaluation that nanoSD supports heterogeneous architectures and is scalable. It is able to efficiently cope network dynamics present in real WSN deployments. It uses features like delta service advertisements, message compression and piggy-backing techniques, which results in low network overhead. Furthermore, nanoSD protocol is easily integratable to web-service based backend systems using very limited resources.