An Adaptive Self-Organizing Protocol with Multiple Stages for Wireless Mesh Networks

Current service discovery protocols have a static protocol behavior with respect to their architecture and their message dissemination strategies. Protocols for ad-hoc networks use optimized flooding techniques, approaches for the Internet are server-centric. Wireless mesh networks are much more flexible in their way of connecting nodes as they can consist of a backbone of mesh routers and a number of mesh clients. We propose a service discovery protocol for wireless mesh networks which automatically adapts its operation mode (stage) dependent on the network situation. The stage considers link stability, resources of a node and the user´s current context. In the default stage, nodes use flooding for message dissemination. In higher stages, more advanced backbone formation techniques are applied. We show that the service discovery operation can benefit from an adaptive protocol behavior.