A Light-Weight Service Discovery Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks
Abstract
Problem statement: In mobile ad hoc networks devices do not rely on a fixed infrastructure and thus have to be self-organizing. This gives rise to various challenges to network applications. Existing service discovery protocols fall short of accommodating the complexities of the ad-hoc environment. However, the performance of distributed service discovery architectures that rely on a virtual backbone for locating and registering available services appeared very promising in terms of average delay but in terms of message overhead, are the most heavy-weight. In this research we propose a very light-weight, robust and reliable model for service discovery in wireless and mobile networks by taking into account the limited resources to which are subjected the mobile units. Approach: Three processes are involved in service discovery protocols using virtual dynamic backbone for mobile ad hoc networks: registration, discovery and consistency maintenance. More specifically, the model analytically and realistically differentiates stable from unstable nodes in the network in order to form a subset of nodes constituting a relatively stable virtual Backbone (BB). Results: Overall, results acquired were very satisfactory and meet the performance objectives of effectiveness especially in terms of network load. A notable reduction of almost 80% of message signaling was observed in the network. This criterion distinguishes our proposal and corroborate to its light-weight characteristic. On the other hand, results showed reasonable mean time delay to the requests initiated by the clients. Conclusion: Extensive simulation results obtained confirm the efficiency and the light-weight characteristic of our approach in significantly reducing the cost of message overhead in addition to having the best delay values when compared with strategies well-known in the literature.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3844/jcssp.2009.330.337
Copyright: © 2009 Ranwa Al Mallah and Alejandro Quintero. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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Keywords
- Service discovery
- ad-hoc networks
- virtual backbone
- stability