Enhanced Service Discovery Model for Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are the only cost-effective networks that support seamless connectivity, wide area network (WAN) coverage, and mobility features. However, the rapid increase in the number of users on these networks has brought an upsurge in competition for available resources and services. Consequently, factors such as link congestion, data collisions, link interferences, etc. are likely to occur during service discovery on these networks. This further degrades their quality of service (QoS). Therefore, the quick and timely discovery of these services becomes an essential parameter in optimizing the performance of service discovery on WMNs. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of an enhanced service discovery model that solves the performance bottleneck incurred by service discovery on WMNs. The proposed model integrates the particle swarm optimization (PSO) and ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms to improve QoS. We use the PSO algorithm to assign different priorities to services on the network. On the other hand, we use the ACO algorithm to effectively establish the most cost-effective path whenever each transmitter has to be searched to identify whether it possesses the requested service(s). Furthermore, we design and implement the link congestion reduction (LCR) algorithm to define the number of service receivers to be granted access to services simultaneously. We simulate, test, and evaluate the proposed model in Network Simulator 2 (NS2), against ant colony-based multi constraints, QoS-aware service selection (QSS), and FLEXIble Mesh Service Discovery (FLEXI-MSD) models. The results show an average service discovery throughput of 80%, service availability of 96%, service discovery delay of 1.8 s, and success probability of service selection of 89%.