Capability reconciliation for virtual device composition in mobile ad hoc networks

The proliferation of networked appliances or dedicated function consumer devices with embedded processors and network connection capabilities is driving the virtual device concept, whereby such appliances can be controlled, monitored, managed, and extended beyond what they were initially designed to do. The dynamic and ad hoc nature of the discovery and composition of such devices and the services they provide inevitably leads to capability differences, whereby the input of a service B is not compatible with the output of a service A; A and B needing to be composed. Moreover, current schemes for service composition in MANETs do not consider capability differences. We present a distributed constraint satisfaction problem for capability reconciliation in MANETs, and through simulation show its effectiveness and efficiency.