Service Discovery in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks*

Service Discovery is expected to become a crucial application of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). A number of existing service discovery protocols is mainly aimed at infrastructure-based and/or 1-hop ad hoc wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism using hierarchical grid architectures for service discovery in MANET. The geographic area of MANET is partitioned into 2D logical hierarchy grid. In each grid, we select a directory node to cache the available service descriptions that are registered by the providers for replying the inquiry of requestors. For enhancing the efficiency of registration and discovery, we propose service registration and discovery transmission patterns. The shared service description is registered in the grids of registration pattern. When a seeker needs a service, it obtains the descriptions along the discovery pattern. Finally, the performance shows that our protocol can work efficiently in any density and different scales of networks.