Context based service discovery algorithm for ad hoc mobile cloud

Abstract

Proliferation of Cloud markets has created influx of e-service consumers seeking cost effective services. But, mobile consumers face the challenge of intermittent internet disconnection, long latency, and high energy consumption. To address this challenge, Ad-hoc Mobile Cloud (AMC) paradigm has evolved, where web services are hosted and provided by mobile peers. However, there are three inherent challenges in AMC service discovery. The first is how to discover the node that has the context capability of providing the needed service. Second, the dynamic nature of the environment in terms of node mobility and third, is the issue of resource limitation. While literature has done much on the second and third challenges, the issue of the context of the service provider node is yet to receive much attention. On the other hand, most attempt to address the first challenge have been in the perspective of MANETs, where services are either hardware or software entities. Hence discovering services is based on best routes and node availability without necessarily considering the context of the provider's node. This discovery approach has great impact on quality of service like the response time. To tackle this, we propose a context based service discovery algorithm. The algorithm uses a Search All Pick One Algorithm (SAPOA) to discover the closest service based on the provider's context. An experiment is conducted using 10 nodes with 4 services. Our result provides the best service based on the trade-off between context battery level and distance.