Resource and service discovery in wireless ad-hoc networks with agile computing

Resource and service discovery in tactical networking environments is a challenging problem. The ad-hoc and peer-to-peer nature of the network invalidates many traditional approaches to resource and service discovery that rely on registries. The agile computing middleware supports opportunistic service and resource discovery and tasking in tactical environments. The group manager component of the middleware supports bandwidth-efficient discovery of neighboring nodes, their resources (including CPU, memory, storage, and connectivity), and their services. Nodes may join one or more groups that allow resources and services to be categorized into related sets. Applications using the group manager are notified about the appearance and disappearance of peers as well as changes in memberships of groups. The group manager is efficient in finding neighboring services and is designed to improve the probability of finding resource-rich nodes. Crosslayer integration between the group manager and the MANET layer reduces the network overhead and improves performance.