A DNS protocol - based Service Discovery architecture for disaster response systems

Disaster response systems improve the situational awareness of responders and assist them by providing a wide range of services including communications, sensing/actuating and data collection and processing. The services are hosted on various types of devices such as laptops, PDAs, sensors and actuators that usually are interconnected through a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET). Interactions are required between these various services and this makes service discovery a key component of disaster relief systems. In this paper we propose a novel DNS-based service discovery architecture for disaster response systems. Our architecture employs the recent IETF proposal, DNS-based Service Discovery (DNS-SD) for representing service information as DNS records, and uses a cluster-based approach to dynamically form service directories and to enable service discovery.