A service collaboration strategy for MANETs

Abstract

With the emergency of the ubiquity of mobile personal computing devices and the pervasiveness of wireless broadband communication, mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are becoming applicable and popular in the area of pervasive computing. A device can roam into a wireless network to provide networked services which can be discovered and utilized by other services. However, the prevalent service discovery protocols, such as UPnP, Salutation, SLP and Jini, fall short of accommodating the complexities and special characteristics of MANETs, such as highly dynamic topology, intermittent connectivity and constrained resources. Some service collaboration solutions based on peer-to-peer caching or virtual backbone have been proposed for MANETs. They aims to increase the service availability while decreasing the network trafile. This paper suggests a service collaboration strategy for MANETs aiming to further increase the service availability and stabilize the service collaboration system. Slotted bandwidth utilization scheme and mobile service code scheme efficiently utilize the available bandwidth to duplicate network services in mobile nodes and to transmit the prioritized service collaboration information. The radio propagation range is adaptively adjusted according to the density of mobile nodes so that the battery power consumed is reduced. © 2006 IEEE.