Service discovery for simple mobile services:Master's thesis

The aim of this research was to find a service discovery solution for simple mobile services. Simple Mobile Services (also referred as SMS) is a possible emerging concept of mobile services which will be simple to find, use, trust and develop. The existing service discovery protocols do not fulfil the needs of SMS; the main problem being that they are too complicated and have too many features for SMS. The conclusion was that a new solution had to be developed. A constructive research method was used in this study. A service discovery solution was developed on the basis of a set of requirements for SMS applications and technologies, and was described through use case scenarios, supported features and protocol messages. Simplicity and light weight were used as the main requirements. The primary ways of fulfilling those requirements were the use of as minimal protocol message exchange and as small message packet sizes as possible. The solution was validated by simulation. One goal of the simulations was to optimize the protocol delay. Therefore, it was important to determine the parameters that effect to the delay. Other simulation cases were to measure packet loss rate and throughput. The results of this study include the developed service discovery protocol and simulation results. The protocol includes the main functions needed in discovery of SMS, and it was validated as being viable. The protocol does not have a notable impact on the overall throughput. The best functionality is reached with small overall packet loss rates and background traffic packet sizes, and the protocol is not optimal when the network capacity limits are being approached. However, some functions and features needed in SMS service discovery are missing or they could be implemented differently. The main conclusion from this study is that the developed service discovery solution is a basis for a more advanced protocol that supports the SMS requirements, and it could be used as a model for future solutions