A network layer based architecture for service discovery in mobile ad hoc networks

Service discovery is an integral pail of constructing a self-configuring mobile ad hoc network (MANET). While several service discovery protocols have been developed, most of them are designed for infrastructure-based networks and thus not suitable to be used in MANET. On the other hand, service discovery protocols that have been designed for MANET suffer from problems with two critical issues. Firstly, they have limited scalability due to the extensive use of broadcast communication. Secondly, they usually lack context aware selection mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a network layer supported comprehensive service discovery solution that addresses the above issues and provides solutions in two parts. First we discuss a location aware network layer routing protocol that groups mobile nodes into clusters where a gateway at each cluster is responsible for routing. Then we propose a service discovery protocol that utilizes directories for service discovery that interact with lower network layer gateway configuration. Our service discovery solution includes an agent-based context aware service selection.