A New Approach to Service Discovery in Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Service discovery, essential for many wireless applications, is more difficult to achieve in Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETS) than in both wired and traditional wireless networks due to the lack of central control. In addition, the heterogeneity, mobility, and limited energy of the devices precludes the use of traditional service discovery protocols. This paper presents HESED, a fundamentally different service discovery protocol based on multicast query and multicast reply. Clients multicast their service query and matching servers multicast their response to all nodes. This service information is cached by all, reducing the number of queries. HESED uses only symmetric links, providing reliability for its forwarding algorithms. Simulation results show that HESED significantly outperforms a traditional on¿demand service discovery algorithm.