Mobility and service discovery in opportunistic networks

Past research on opportunistic communications has demonstrated the power of mobile phones as information mediators and content providers to co-located devices. As an extension of opportunistic communication paradigm, opportunistic computing and services research leverages the powerful capabilities and pervasive nature of modern smartphones to provision services to nearby nodes. When an opportunistic network is viewed as a provider of services rather than as a simple message routing system, node and service discovery come to play a critical role. This paper discusses several factors that affect the discover ability of pervasive services with current existing devices in light of their practical limitations. Moreover, the impact of these limitations to pervasive service discovery is studied in evaluation results.