ADDER: Probabilistic, Application Layer Service Discovery for MANETs and Hybrid Wired-Wireless Networks

Over the past years, Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) have attracted a considerable degree of research attention, with service discovery, selection and invocation being among the topics of interest of previous efforts. In this paper we introduce ADDER, a probabilistic, hybrid, directory-less service discovery mechanism. It has been designed for military IPv6-based MANETs but will work in any hybrid wired-wireless deployment. It achieves very low service acquisition time through the exchange of a very small number of short messages. Propagation of service descriptions is based on a distance vector algorithm, achieving loop and starvation freedom through a feasibility condition, which has been adopted from established and well-tested routing protocols. This paper also presents evaluation results, obtained by actual execution of the ADDER daemon on two different test beds. The experiments aim to demonstrate that the mechanism achieves good scalability with increasing number of services and network size.