Service discovery protocols for constrained machine-to-machine communications

An emerging trend in many applications is to use resource-constrained wireless devices for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. The observed proliferation of wireless embedded systems is expected to have a significant impact on future M2M applications if the services provided can be automatically discovered and accessed at runtime. In order to realize the decoupling of M2M applications and services, energy efficient service discovery mechanisms must be designed so as to minimize human intervention during configuration and management phases. However, many traditional service discovery protocols cannot be applied to wireless constrained devices because they introduce too much overhead, fail in a duty-cycled environment or require significant memory resources. To address this, either new protocols are being proposed or existing ones are adapted to meet the requirements of constrained networks. In this article, we provide a comprehensive overview of service discovery protocols that have been recently proposed for constrained M2M communications by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Advantages, disadvantages, performance and challenges of the existing solutions for different M2M scenarios are also analyzed.