AVERT: Adaptive SerVicE and Route Discovery ProTocol for MANETs

In the past few years there has been increasing research interest in service discovery protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). The most promising approaches so far address energy efficiency by merging the service discovery process with the routing process. Actually the service information is piggy-backed into routing messages, so that a node is simultaneously informed of available services and of routes towards the corresponding service providers. This cross layering leads to improved adaptation to the network conditions and at the same time to significant energy savings. Those savings are infeasible if the two processes are implemented separately, because then each one would have to use its own messages and create additional (if not) redundant network overhead. In this paper we propose such a hybrid adaptive protocol for energy consumption-avert users. This protocol, named AVERT, is based on the independent zone routing framework (IZR) and has the ability to allow each node to adapt its zone range (similarly to the way it is done in IZR). We also add a mechanism to adapt the sending rate of proactive messages on each node based only on local traffic monitoring. Through simulations we show that using this mechanism, the energy efficiency achieved is substantially higher compared to similar hybrid service and route discovery protocols.