A Hybrid Message Delivery Scheme for Improving Service Discovery in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

As mobile computing becomes more popular and prevalent, service discovery to search for a service available in the mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) is an important issue. Although mobile computing technologies grow to be ever more powerful and accessible, MANETs - consisting of mobile devices without any fixed infrastructures - possess inherent characteristics such as high mobility and resource constraints. Given these constraints, service discovery in the MANETs should be cost effective than that of the conventional networks in a fixed structure. In this paper, we design and evaluate the service discovery schemes to effectively discover services by using only local information in the MANETs. We first propose two schemes: lower ID scheme and higher degree scheme. Then, we propose a hybrid scheme which provides improved performance by utilizing the advantages, but avoiding the disadvantages of both the schemes. The simulation results show that the average lookup distance and the number of exchanged messages have been significantly reduced compared to the conventional schemes for service discovery.