A comparison of approaches to node and service discovery in 6lowPAN wireless sensor networks

Discovering nodes and services in Wireless Sensor Networks poses several challenges. Different sink and sensor nodes announcement strategies lead to different amounts of resource consumption in terms of processing, memory, communication time and drained energy. This may be aggravated if IP is the underlying protocol, such as in the case of 6lowPAN networks. In this paper three paradigms for node and service discovery are proposed, analyzed and evaluated. The results, obtained by prototyping, show that at least one of the proposed strategies leads to efficient use of resources, showing that node and service discovery in resource-constrained networks such as 6lowPAN is feasible.