Service Discovery in Ad Hoc Networks: Performance Evaluation and QoS Enhancement

With the increasing popularity of wireless portable devices, such as laptops, PDAs and mobile phones, it is getting more and more important for mobile users to discover their required resources (e.g. printers and fax machines) without any need of configurations. To this end, automatic service discovery is an important feature of mobile Ad Hoc networks (Manets). In this paper a service discovery protocol for Manets based on the IETF Service Location Protocol has been implemented in the NS-2 simulator. Its performance is studied under different mobility patterns, network sizes and number of service agents. A lightweight quality of service (QoS) aware service discovery protocol is also proposed to support QoS applications. Zhong Fan is currently a Principal Researcher with Toshiba Research Europe in Bristol, UK. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University, China and the Ph.D. degree in Telecommunication Networks from Durham University, UK. His research interests are protocol design and performance analysis of wireless networks.