An efficient and robust service discovery protocol for dynamic MANETs

Automatic service discovery is essential for the usability of self-configuring Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). Existing service discovery solutions are either directory based or directory-less. The directory based approaches are fast and reliable but have the complexity of maintaining directories in the dynamic MANET environment. On the other hand, the directory-less approaches use broadcasts which are very expensive in MANETs. This paper proposes and evaluates a new service discovery protocol called MANET Service Location and Discovery (MSLD), which is integrated with a stateful auto-configuration protocol called DHAPM. Because of this integration, MSLD reuses the robust directory structure of DHAPM, which allows MSLD to acquire the advantages of the directory based service discovery protocols without any additional complexity of directory maintenance. The performance evaluation shows that MSLD has low service discovery latency and high service availability with minimum communication overhead.