Abstract The practical success of pervasive services running in mobile wireless networks relies largely on its flexibility in providing adaptive and cost‐effective services. Service discovery is an essential mechanism to achieve this goal. As an enhancement to our previous work for service discovery, that is, model‐based service discovery (MBSD), this paper proposes a location‐based service advertisement (SA) algorithm named as MBSD‐sa. MBSD‐sa advocates the importance of service location to the service availability and integrates the service location information together with the service semantic information into service information for advertisement. MBSD‐sa utilizes prediction to estimate the service location so as to reduce the number of SA messages (SAMs). Two complementary types of SA mechanisms (Types 1 and 2) are employed by MBSD‐sa to strike the balance between the SAM overhead and the accuracy of service information. The performance of MBSD‐sa is analyzed both numerically and using simulations. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Asynchronous transfer mode technology promises a flexible, multiservice network that will support the broadband future. It will need to be robust and efficient in delivering quality of service, which will not be achieved by network protocols alone. Performance-management systems will be needed. If future networks are to be flexible-allowing new services to be added easily-then their management systems will need to be equally flexible. Approaches derived from the developing technologies of distributed object-oriented computing (common object request broker architecture-CORBA) and distributed artificial intelligence (agents) could allow management systems to be implemented as sets of small-grain, cooperating distributed objects. Such systems should be more flexible, more robust, and easier to modify. This paper presents a framework being developed for understanding performance-management functions and an approach to their implementation based on agent technology and the use of CORBA platforms.