Service discovery and name resolution architectures for on-demand MANETs

Discovery of services and other named resources is expected to be a crucial feature for the usability of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). In this paper, we propose a mechanism for simple service discovery that reuses name resolvers and name server software used for name resolution. To enhance service availability, one may introduce service coordinators, which store information about services residing on surrounding nodes. Thus, furthermore we propose to use the service discovery mechanism also for messaging between the coordinators and their surroundings. This paper demonstrates that the service location architecture must be designed and tuned to fit well with the underlying routing protocol, especially in on-demand MANETs where reactive routing protocols are being used Finally, we discuss heuristic rules for how to adapt the service discovery architecture to underlying networking characteristics, such as routing.