A Unified Service Discovery Architecture for Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper proposes a unified architecture for service discovery in Wireless Mesh Networks. In this architecture, routing clients and non-routing clients, which connect via a mesh gateway with Service Proxy (SP), can also participate seamlessly in the service discovery process. Therefore, the multicast DNS (mDNS) protocol is encapsulated in Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) messages to make mDNS multi hop capable. Service Caches (SC) on wireless mesh routers are added for efficiency reasons. It is discussed that simple flooding of service discovery messages is not efficient and that inspection of messages at the application layer increases the efficiency of message propagation. We present a plug-in for an OLSR-daemon which is widely used in real world deployments. Finally, the measurements performed in the department’s wireless mesh testbed are discussed with results and conclusions.