Structuring Pervasive Services in Infrastructureless
Networks
Anandha Gopalan, Taieb Znati and
Panos K. Chrysanthis
Abstract:
Realizing the potential of pervasive computing will be predicated upon the
availability of a flexible, mobility-aware infrastructure and technologies to
support seamless service management, provisioning and delivery. Despite
advances in routing and media access control technologies, little progress has
been made toward large-scale deployment of services and applications in
pervasive and ubiquitous environments. The lack of a fixed infrastructure,
coupled with the time-varying characteristics of the underlying network
topology, makes service delivery challenging. This paper addresses the need
for new service models and proposes a mobility-aware service architecture to
support pervasive service provisioning and delivery in an infrastructureless
environment.
The proposed methodology centers around the concepts of virtual homes
and mobility signatures, and decouples service discovery from current
location of the server. We discuss the main functionalities of the proposed
architecture and describe the underlying service discovery mechanisms and
protocols. We also present a novel, piece-meal, location-driven traffic
forwarding algorithm, and analyze its performance using a simulation-based
study. The results show that the algorithm exhibits good performance for
a variety of network environments.