  Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is an infrastructure-less network formed
between a set of mobile nodes. The discovery of services in MANET is a
challenging job due to the unique properties of network. In this paper, a novel
service discovery framework called Hybrid Association Rules Based Network Layer
Discovery of Services for Ad hoc Networks (HANDY) has been proposed. HANDY
provides three major research contributions. At first, it adopts a cross-layer
optimized design for discovery of services that is based on simultaneous
discovery of services and corresponding routes. Secondly, it provides a
multi-level ontology-based approach to describe the services. This resolves the
issue of semantic interoperability among the service consumers in a scalable
fashion. Finally, to further optimize the performance of the discovery process,
HANDY recommends exploiting the inherent associations present among the
services. These associations are used in two ways. First, periodic service
advertisements are performed based on these associations. In addition, when a
response of a service discovery request is generated, correlated services are
also attached with the response. The proposed service discovery scheme has been
implemented in JIST/SWANS simulator. The results demonstrate that the proposed
modifications give rise to improvement in hit ratio of the service consumers
and latency of discovery process.
