Lanes. A lightweigth overlay for service discovery in mobile ad hoc networks

The ability to discover services offered in a mobile ad hoc
network is the major prerequisite for effective usability of
these networks. Unfortunately, existing approaches to service
trading are not well suited for these highly dynamic topologies
since they either rely on centralized servers or on
resource-consuming query flooding. Application layer overlays
seem to be a more promising approach. However, existing
solutions like the Content-Addressable Network (CAN) are
especially designed for internet based peer-to-peer networks
yielding structural conditions that are far too complex for ad
hoc networks. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a more
lightweight overlay structure: lanes. We present algorithms to
correct and optimize its structure in case of topology changes
and show how it enables the trading of services specified by
arbitrary descriptions.