Evaluating transmission time of service discovery protocols by using NS2 simulator

Many publications have discussed the Service Discovery problem and introduced a comparison among different types of its protocols, but very few of these publications evaluated the performance of these protocols. This is due to the variation of the intended target, and the purpose behind the design of each protocol; such as UPnP designed for home or small office networks while Jini and SLP focus on enterprise environments. Consequently, it is difficult to evaluate them by using the same network configuration and under the same conditions. This paper produces an evaluation for some of service discovery protocols by using NS2 simulator. This evaluation includes an assessment to the required transmission time required in the sending and receiving of messages for discovering all services in a defined network, and the cost for each examined protocol to achieve this process. Cost means the required preparation time and number of messages that should be transmitted to discover all services in the defined network.