Semantic-based resource discovery, composition and substitution in IEEE 802.11 mobile ad hoc networks

We present a general framework for resource discovery, composition and substitution in mobile ad-hoc networks, exploiting knowledge representation techniques. Key points of the proposed approach are: (1) reuse of discovery information at network layer in order to build a fully unified semantic-based discovery and routing framework; (2) use of semantic annotations in order to perform the orchestration of elementary resources for building personalized services adopting a concept covering procedure, and to allow the automatic substitution of no more suitable/available components. Using ns-2 simulator, we evaluated performances of the proposed framework with reference to a disaster recovery scenario. In particular, the impact of the number of available services and active clients has been investigated in various mobility conditions and for several service covering threshold levels. Obtained results show that: (1) the proposed framework is highly scalable, given that its overall performance is improved by increasing the number of active clients; (2) the traffic load due to clients is negligible; (3) also for a very small number of available service providers very high hit ratios can be reached; (4) increasing the number of providers can lead to hit ratios very close to 100% at the expense of an increased traffic load. Finally, the effectiveness of cross-layer interaction between routing and resource discovery protocols has been also evaluated and discussed.