A reliable service discovery protocol using mobile agents in MANET

Recently mobile agents are being used in many applications for mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) for instance to discover and spread service information among the nodes in MANET. Here agents travel through the network, collecting the dynamically changing service information. However, reliability and availability issues are needed to be addressed while designing mobile agent based (service discovery) protocols before it can be deployed for a broad range of commercial applications in MANET. Since MANET provides a resource constrained dynamic environment, it introduces new aspects to dependability thereby affecting reliability of the services provided by the mobile agent based system. But no work till now addresses the reliability analysis of these protocols or design of such protocols from reliability perspective. In this paper we propose a novel service discovery protocol using mobile agents for MANET with reliable performance for a given MANET configuration. The agents select their route dynamically and exchange service information with the nodes in order to speed up the process. The complexity of such a system makes it hard to obtain the theoretical task route reliability of the provider; instead we estimate it using Monte Carlo simulation. Smooth Random Mobility Model (SRMM) is used to estimate node location at a particular time. Multipath propagation effect of radio signals is also considered. The experimental results show the robustness of the proposed scheme.