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Service discovery is an integral part of the ad hoc networking to achieve stand-alone and self-configurable communication networks. In this paper, we discuss possible service discovery architectures along with the required network support for their implementation, and we propose a distributed service discovery architecture which relies on a virtual backbone for locating and registering available services within a dynamic network topology. Our proposal consists of two independent components: (i) formation of a virtual backbone and (ii) distribution of service registrations, requests, and replies. The first component creates a mesh structure from a subset of a given network graph that includes the nodes acting as service brokers and a subset of paths (which we refer as virtual links) connecting them. Service broker nodes (SBNs) constitute a dominating set, i.e. all the nodes in the network are either in this set or only one …