UPNP Service Discovery for Heterogeneous Networks

It is desirable that future networks make the use of services and other resources simple for everyone. In that sense, service discovery comes to fill a gap in the networking field, since it eliminates most of the configuration and maintenance tasks. The universal plug and play (UPnP) architecture does so by dividing the communication session in six different phases, and by providing the user with a friendly interface to the services. UPnP was mainly designed with wired or fixed wireless infrastructure networks in mind, and thus is not the optimum solution for the future mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), where devices are usually battery operated and mobile. In this paper, we present an extension for the UPnP architecture which is designed specifically for wireless ad hoc networks. We made a performance analysis, and show that it has very promising performance characteristics. These extensions were carefully designed to be minimal ones, in order to make it compatible with the existing UPnP framework. The paper shows that UPnP is a promising alternative as service discovery protocol for heterogeneous networks