Analysis of Decentralized Resource and Service Discovery Mechanisms in Wireless Multi-hop Networks

The last few years, research in wireless multi-hop networks is mainly driven by a search for efficient routing protocols. From an application point of view, nodes (users) will only setup connections with a specific goal, i.e. in order to use services and resources available in or reachable through the ad hoc network. Consequently, resource and service discovery (R&SD) protocols that allow nodes to learn available services in the network are indispensable. In this paper we compare the performance of two basic decentralized R&SD techniques, proactive and reactive discovery, through simulations and theoretical analysis. Our results show that the choice between them is not straightforward. It highly depends on the network and service characteristics and on the interaction with the underlying routing protocols. Therefore, our analysis provides some guidelines for developing new or extending existing R&SD protocols for operation in mobile ad hoc networks.