The 17th Annual IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC’06) UPNP SERVICE DISCOVERY FOR HETEROGENEOUS NETWORKS

It is desirable that future networks make the use of services and other resources simple for everyone. In that sense, ser-vice discovery comes to fill a gap in the networking field, since it eliminates most of the configuration and maintenance tasks. The Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) architecture does so by di-viding the communication session in six different phases, and by providing the user with a friendly interface to the services. UPnP was mainly designed with wired or fixed wireless in-frastructure networks in mind, and thus is not the optimum so-lution for the future mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), where devices are usually battery operated and mobile. In this paper, we present an extension for the UPnP architecture which is de-signed specifically for wireless ad hoc networks. We made a performance analysis, and show that it has very promising per-formance characteristics. These extensions were carefully de-signed to be minimal ones, in order to make it compatible with the existing UPnP framework. The paper shows that UPnP is a promising alternative as service discovery protocol for hetero-geneous networks. I