BonAHA: Service Discovery Framework for Mobile Ad-Hoc Applications

In today's mobile networks, devices often move from one network to the next, forming transitory associations without a fixed support infrastructure. The state in this network frequently changes due to node transitions, and nodes are always meeting new peers. In this scenario, traditional models for writing networking software, such as the client-server model or even the peer-to-peer model, turn out to be unsuitable for writing such "ad-hoc applications". A new framework needs to be developed for this class of applications to be aware of node transitions as well as metadata (properties) that the nodes possess. In this paper, we present a framework we have built for this class of applications. Our library, called BonAHA (Bonjour for Ad-Hoc Applications) aims to be easy and intuitive, abstract the ad-hoc networking details and at the same time provide flexibility to the developer to develop powerful and rich ad-hoc applications.