Stabilizing cluster structures in mobile networks for OLSR and WCPD as Basis for Service Discovery

Service discovery is one of the most fundamental building blocks of self-organization. While mature approaches exist in the realm of fixed networks, they are not directly applicable in the context of MANETs. We investigate and compare two different protocols as basis for service discovery, namely OLSR and WCPD. OLSR is a proactive routing protocol while WCPD is a path discovery protocol integrating node and link stability criteria. Two conflicting objectives of service discovery are the coverage of service queries together with the required bandwidth. Simulations are performed based on a setting in a city center with human mobility. We show that OLSR outperforms WCPD in terms of coverage. Due to its proactive nature, however, bandwidth consumption is high. WCPD on the other hand is much more bandwidth efficient, but at the cost of lower coverage. Finally, we motivate employing OLSR on top of an overlay topology maintained by WCPD. This fosters stability while reducing overhead and keeping coverage high. As a first step towards a hybrid protocol, we aim at increasing the stability of the communication paths. To do so, an adaptive approach is used, which increases the robustness of the network topology structures.