GSD: A Novel Group-based Service Discovery Protocol for MANETs

This paper proposes a novel distributed service discovery protocol for Mobile Ad hoc Networks. The protocol is based on the concept of peer-to-peer caching of service advertisements and group-based intelligent forwarding of service requests. It does not require a service to register to a registry or lookup server. Services are described using an ontology based on the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML+OIL). We exploit the semantic class/subClass hierarchy of DAML to describe service groups and use this semantic information to selectively forward service requests to respective nodes. DAML-based service description helps us in achieving increased flexibility in service matching. We also present simulation results of our protocol and show that our protocol achieves increased efficiency in discovering services by efficiently utilizing bandwidth by controlling forwarding of service requests.