Ad hoc networks are well suited to support ambient intelligence applications, that is, to provide an immediate access to resources (i.e., content or services) anywhere, anytime, at low cost. In this context, automatic discovery of resources within the network plays an essential role. However, conventional resource discovery solutions are not well suited for ad hoc networks, as they, in particular, use broadcasting to discover service providers. This results in the unavailability of the ad hoc network, which is induced by broadcast storms.

Another critical issue in ad hoc networks is to enable users to easily access information from both the local and the wide area (e.g., the Internet). However, we have not yet reached the point where anywhere, anytime network access is actually offered. Infrastructure-based wireless networks use fixed network access points with which mobile terminals interact for communicating. Unfortunately, the unavailability of a base station results in network failure. Ad hoc networking may then be exploited for accessing resources available in the local area, which comes at no cost for users, and possibly accessing a WLAN base station to reach resources available in the wide area. The issue that we are addressing is on setting up an ad hoc network of mobile terminals that cooperate to access resources from the local network, and also to offer utilities intended to discover resources in the global network (i.e., the Internet), when needed. This requires interaction with the base station to gain access to the rich set of available Internet resources, when sought resources are not available in the local area. In this context, we have first concentrated on how to improve the Web latency using a WLAN, exploiting both the ad hoc and infrastructure-based capabilities of the network. Our main design objective was to minimize the energy cost of peer-to-peer communication among mobile terminals, so as to allow for inexpensive access when a fixed access point is not available in the communication range of the mobile terminal.