A gossip protocol to support service discovery with heterogeneous ontologies in MANETs

Service discovery in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is an integral part for collective application interoperability. The discovery process must cope not only with transient communication but also with an environment where autonomous mobile nodes act as both service providers and consumers. Imposing prede ned service interfaces in such an unpredictable and dynamic environment is an inapppropriate assumption. A more exible description and discovery mechanism can be provided with the use of ontologies and semantic reasoning. Assuming that services are described by heterogeneous ontologies poses many technical challenges but is more realistic than requiring a single domain ontology. In particular, a mechanism is required to match the different ontologies and make provided services available to all nodes. In this paper we present a model to support semantic service discovery in MANETs. A core part of the model is the distributed approach to ontology matching. We rely on the use of a novel gossip protocol that offers an even utilisation of physical resources across the participating nodes. This makes the model suitable for resource constraint mobile devices. We present the gossip protocol and an evaluation that shows the good scalability and discovery properties of the protocol.