EASARD: Towards an efficient Energy-Aware Service and Route Discovery scheme in MANET

MANETs are highly dynamic and suffer from frequent and unpredictable changes in the network topology due to the fact that devices are mobile and operate with low battery power. Due to limited computing power, high mobility and the lack of a central coordinating entity, service discovery in MANETs has been an attractive area of research. However, proposed solutions are broadcast-based and result in overloading the constrained network. The issue addressed in this paper is therefore to provide a cross-layer Service Discovery in order to reduce energy consumption. In this work we propose an efficient Energy-Aware Service And Route Discovery scheme called EASARD. We extended the Zone Routing Protocol in order to encapsulate service information in its routing messages. We present a performance comparison of EASARD versus another integrated protocol in terms of energy consumption. We evaluate how the different approaches affect the energy usage of mobile devices. Extensive simulation demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over other cross-layer schemes.