DiSUS: Mobile ad hoc network unstructured services

Abstract

Mobile devices are situated in an environment that consists of infrastructure and ad hoc networks. Unlike infrastructure networks, ad hoc networks are highly dynamic, wireless and do not have any centralised administration. These two environments accommodate two types of services: one type is registered and discovered using toolsets found within structured networks, e.g., JINI and UDDI, and the other type of service is situated within a network that has no structure, as in P2P. Our work highlights a key solution for providing unstructured services in a mobile ad hoc environment. This paper shows how mobile ad hoc systems can construct and semantically discover unstructured services in their environment. We describe the Distributed Semantic Unstructured Services (DiSUS) framework; the protocols used and describe the functionality of the prototype system we have developed. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2003.