Service Discovery in Urban Cooperative Networks

The recent technological developments in communication networks have results into a broad range of networks, e.g.,Wi-Fi, Mobile ad-hoc networks(MANET), 3G and other cellular networks, wireless sensor networks, etc. It is envisioned that such diverse networks must cooperate with each other to form cooperative urban networks, for the sake of making use of all the services and resources. Such integration poses great challenges for service discovery, for example, interoperability, robustness, scalability and context-awareness. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical architecture to meet the requirements of service discovery in cooperative urban networks, in which we assume various urban networks are connected to overlay infrastructure through cooperative gateway to form cooperative urban networks. We apply hierarchical architecture to urban networks and overlay infrastructure network in order to discover services using optimal service selection algorithm to take into account context-awareness issue. We also compare the performance of our architecture with distributed and centralized architectures.