Structuring pervasive services in infrastructureless networks

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.