Towards Opportunistic Service Provisioning in Intermittently Connected Hybrid Networks

An intermittently connected mobile ad hoc hybrid network (ICHN) is one of the challenging networks induced by the proliferation of handheld devices equipped with wireless interfaces. It is formed by a number of fixed info stations, hosting service providers, and some mobile devices, hosting service clients, organized in an ad hoc network facing frequent connectivity disruptions. This paper focuses on two novel protocols that form the basis of a service provisioning platform specifically designed for ICHN. It details a service discovery protocol and a service invocation protocol that implement in particular an opportunistic routing based on a time-aware heuristic. Performance evaluation shows that the specialization of TAO is able to guarantee good performance with limited overhead.