Service Locating for Large-Scale Mobile Ad-Hoc Network

In a mobile ad-hoc network, an efficient service discovery system is needed to locate various service providers. However, because an ad-hoc network has no fixed topology, its service locating is quite different from traditional schemes for the Internet. In this article, we present a novel service locating system specifically designed for large-scale mobile ad-hoc networks. In our system, a subset of nodes is dynamically elected and self-organized into a virtual backbone (VB). These VB nodes manage the directory information of services and monitor path quality of service on behalf of end users. Such information is then used to direct the selection of appropriate providers. We evaluate the performance of our system through simulation. The result demonstrates that the proposed locating system greatly improves the quality of service delivery while maintaining reasonably low cost.