Integrated service discovery architecture for heterogeneous networks

The discovery and management of desired network services present significant challenges for mobile networks. Based on the Service Location Protocol, this paper proposes an integrated service discovery architecture for vehicular ad hoc networks. The proposed approach divides the network into several logical zones. The zone structure is formed virtually based on position information. Each logical zone may have a zone directory agent to manage registered services from service providers. The proposed architecture considers both vehicle‐to‐infrastructure and vehicle‐to‐vehicle communication modes and introduces roadside directory agents and vehicle directory agents to reduce deployment costs. We also introduce a substitute query technique, cache mechanism, and backup mechanism to improve the request hit ratio and reduce the message overhead of the substitute query. Finally, we implement the proposed mechanisms in Network Simulator version 2, with simulation results showing that the proposed architecture can provide a high average data hit ratio and low message overhead. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.