Service discovery using volunteer nodes for pervasive environments

We propose a service discovery architecture called VSD (service discovery based on volunteers) for heterogeneous and dynamic pervasive computing environments. The proposed architecture uses a small subset of the nodes called volunteers that perform directory services. Relatively stable and capable nodes serve as volunteers, thus recognizing node heterogeneity in terms of mobility and capability. We discuss characteristics of VSD architecture and methods to improve connectivity among volunteers for higher discovery rate. By showing that VSD performs quite well compared to a broadcast based scheme in MANET scenarios, we validate that VSD is a flexible and adaptable architecture appropriate for dynamic pervasive computing environments. VSD incorporates several novel features: i) handles dynamism and supports self-reconfiguration; ii) provides physical locality and scalability; and iii) improves reliability and copes with uncertainty through redundancy by forming overlapped clusters.