A framework for specification and performance evaluation of service discovery protocols in mobile ad-hoc networks

Service discovery protocols are extremely important for developing distributed applications in ad-hoc environments. However to perform Service Discovery in mobile ad-hoc networks requires the design and development of extremely complex and dynamic systems. This requires a paradigm shift in the methodologies employed to design and evaluate these systems so as to ensure quality and correctness. Currently there exists no generic method for formally specifying these systems. Due to this it is extremely difficult to formally analyze protocols in this domain to study and observe the behavior. The same issue also hinders comparison of different protocols against a fixed set of metrics. In this work we propose a framework for the formal specification of service discovery protocols in mobile ad-hoc networks. The purpose of this framework is to provide a formal basis for performance evaluation and behavioral study of these protocols. This allows different service discovery architectures to be evaluated against a given set of metrics, a generic way to specify protocols and an automated process for performance evaluation and behavioral study.