Service and device discovery of nodes in a wireless sensor network

Abstract: Emerging wireless communication standards and more capable sensors and actuators have pushed further development of wireless sensor networks. Deploying a large number of sensor nodes requires a high-level framework enabling the devices to present themselves and the resources they hold. The device and the resources can be described as services, and in this paper, we review a number of well-known service discovery protocols. Bonjour stands out with its auto-configuration, distributed architecture, and sharing of resources. We also present a lightweight implementation in order to demonstrate that an emerging standards-based device and service discovery protocol can actually be deployed on small wireless sensor nodes.