A routing layer based approach for energy efficient service discovery in mobile ad hoc networks

Service discovery can be greatly enhanced in terms of efficiency, both regarding service discoverability and energy consumption, by piggybacking service information into routing messages. Thus, service discovery does not generate additional messages and a node requesting a service, in addition to discovering that service, it is simultaneously informed of the route to the service provider. We extended the Zone Routing Protocol in order to encapsulate service information in its routing messages. Our extended protocol, E-ZRP, may be seen as a representative of routing layer protocols providing service discovery functionality. Simulations demonstrate the superiority of this routing layer-based service discovery scheme over that of a similar, but application layer based service discovery scheme. In order to have a thorough evaluation of our approach we introduced a new metric, called Service Availability Duration (SAD), which characterizes the ‘quality’ of discovered services and experimentally examines the implications of network density and node mobility on the availability of services discovered with E-ZRP, as a typical representative of routing layer based service discovery protocols. Copyright# 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.