Performance Analysis of Two Approaches to Service Discovery in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks Dante Arias Torres 1 and J. Antonio Garc´ ıa Mac´ ıas 2 1 Faculty of Sciences Benito Ju´arez Autonomous University of Oaxaca 5 de Mayo 111, Oaxaca de Ju´arez, Oaxaca, M´ exico dante@fciencias.uabjo.mx 2 Computer Science Department CICESE Research Center Km. 107 Carretera Tijuana-Ensenada, Ensenada, M´ exico jagm@cicese.mx Abstract. In recent years, diverse solutions for service discovery in mo- bile ad hoc networks have been proposed. These solutions basically follow two approaches: the first one considers routing and service discovery as separate activities (i.e. implementing independent protocols for each ac- tivity); the second one integrates routing and service discovery into a single protocol. Based on this second approach we extend the AODV routing protocol to also perform service discovery. We analyze and com- pare the performance of both approaches. The results show that the integration of routing and service discovery reduces the amount of traffic generated and the time necessary to find a service. 1 Introduction The technological revolution of recent years encompasses radical changes; we are in the transition from the personal computer era (one device per person) to the era of ubiquitous computing where people will use, at the same time and sometimes without knowing it, many digital platforms, anywhere, anytime [1]. In such an environment, interactions between devices will be carried out spontaneously and transparently, being very common the formation of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) [2] with these devices. In these scenarios, the resources can be represented as services, which can be offered by devices (such as printers, sensors, personal computers, etc.) or by specialized software [3]. The presence of ad-hoc networks between devices and the representation of resources as services does not suffice to have an ubiquitous computing environment; it is also necessary to have a mechanism that allows discovering available resources. The problem of service discovery has been studied extensively, and solutions such as Jini [4], SLP [5], UPnP [6], etc., have been proposed. These mechanisms have been developed for fixed networks with pre-established infrastructure, thus, they can not be applied to networks with limited resources, where nodes move