Integrating service discovery with routing and session management for ad-hoc networks

In this paper, we propose GSR: a new routing and session management protocol for ad-hoc networks as an integral part of a service discovery infrastructure. Traditional approaches place routing at a layer below service discovery. While this distinction is appropriate for wired networked services, we argue that in ad-hoc networks this layering is not as meaningful and show that integrating routing with discovery infrastructure increases system efficiency. Central to our protocol is the idea of reusing the path created by the combination of a service discovery request and a service advertisement for data transmission. This precludes the need to use separate routing and discovery protocols. GSR also combines transport layer features and provides end-to-end session management that detects disconnections, link and node failures and enables service-centric session redirection to handle failures. This enables GSR to accommodate service-centric routing apart from the traditional node-centric routing. We compare GSR with AODV in terms of packet delivery ratio, response time and average number of hops traveled by service requests as well as data. GSR achieves better packet delivery ratio with a minor increase of the average packet delivery delay.