The OLSR mDNS Extension for Service Discovery

In wireless community networks users can communicate with each other directly without accessing the public Internet. However, the typical use of these networks is to provide Internet access, with a subset of users sharing their broadband connectivity acting as gateways. Other services offered inside the community network are not exploited by the majority of the users. We believe this happens because essential tools like DNS and service discovery are hard to deploy in highly distributed and anarchic networks. In this work we propose an extension to the OLSR protocol to support the delivery of mDNS traffic. We present a demo of our implementation that is devised for the GNU/Linux operating system. The implementation has been tested both on standard PCs and on embedded devices running OpenWRT. This protocol enhancement makes possible to perform distributed name resolution and service discovery in community networks, using standard tools already installed on most users´ computers.