An efficient service discovery protocol for 6LoWPANs

In the ubiquitous computing era, devices and services are everywhere. To make use of the existing capabilities, a proficient service announcement and discovery protocol is needed. In this paper, we propose an efficient protocol to announce and discover services in IP-based ubiquitous sensor networks; a promising technology to make real the revelation of ubiquity. The proposed protocol adopts a fully distributed approach using an adaptive pull-push model to ensure optimal acquisition times, low energy consumption, and low generated overhead with timely reaction to topology changes. The proposed protocol achieves this by using context-awareness information, delivered by a trickle algorithm. The protocol is implemented in Contiki and evaluated in the Cooja simulator. Obtained results prove the protocol capabilities to realize optimal acquisition times with a minimal cost in terms of energy and generated overhead, making it suitable for mobile networks.