Survey of Service Discovery Protocols and Benefits of Combining Service and Route Discovery

A service can be any tangible or intangible thing that can be useful for someone. For example when a laborer works for building a house, he is giving his services for which he is paid. Similarly a teacher teaches to his students providing them knowledge that is useful for students. This act of teaching is a service provided by a teacher to his students. In our context of mobile ad hoc networks any facility provided by a device that can be useful for any other device is a service. A service in this context could be a software service like providing an implementation of some algorithm (for example, converting one audio file format to another) on a device so that when some device needs this service, it can contact that device and use it. A service can also be a hardware service like a printer that can be used by a mobile device to print a file. To get benefit from these services a device must be able to locate them in the network and also have the ability to invoke these services [1]. Here comes the role of service discovery protocols. In fixed and wired networks service discovery protocols simplify the interaction among users, devices and services [22]. Service discovery protocols allow devices to automatically discover network services thus making the task of net-work administration and configuration easy.