Wireless open service networks

We describe a networking infrastructure, called wireless open service networks, that allows service providers such as content providers to compete in open marketplaces. Using this open infrastructure, customers are empowered with dynamic choice of a variety of services at various levels, beyond just their traditional choices in network access services. In the meantime, service providers are given the opportunity to bundle services at multiple levels to maximize the performance of service delivery to end users. For the implementation of these wireless open service networks, we present a service address resolution protocol (SARP). Using SARP requests, customers can discover available services over a local wireless network. Using SARP replies, service providers can make their services known to customers. SARP resides at the link-layer and is light-weight, to allow easy and ubiquitous deployment. SARP can be viewed as a natural extension of the widely used address resolution protocol (ARP) which discovers link-layer addresses such as Ethernet MAC addresses. We give application examples to illustrate these concepts. In addition, we discuss the design of SARP and our implementation experience