Service discovery for delay tolerant networks

Service discovery is an essential step in deploying many wireless network applications. The design of service discovery protocols is particularly challenging for mobile wireless networks because of their dynamic and unstructured nature. Most of the previously proposed protocols are based on the assumption that there exists an end-to-end connection from the query source node to the destination node, the assumption that rarely holds for mobile wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a novel service discovery protocol for delay tolerant networks in which all node connections are intermittent. We use Bloom filter to describe services through a fixed size string and provide efficient service announcement and search. The service queries are spread in the network via random walk and forwarded using node meeting history as a hint. Our simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves good performance as measured by the service discovery success rate, delay and overhead.