Service discovery is an integral part of the ad hoc networking toachieve stand-alone and self-configurable communication networks. Inthis paper, we discuss possible service discovery architectures alongwith the required network support for their implementation, and wepropose a distributed service discovery architecture which relies on avirtual backbone for locating and registering available serviceswithin a dynamic network topology. Our proposal consists of twoindependent components: (i) formation of a virtual backbone and (ii)distribution of service registrations, requests, and replies. Thefirst component creates a mesh structure from a subset of a givennetwork graph that includes the nodes acting as service brokers and asubset of paths (which we refer as virtual links) connectingthem. Service broker nodes (SBNs) constitute a dominating set, i.e.all the nodes in the network are either in this set or only one-hopaway from at least one member of the set. The second componentestablishes sub-trees rooted at service requesting nodes andregistering servers for efficient dissemination of the servicediscovery probing messages. Extensive simulation results are providedfor comparison of performance measures ,i.e. latency, success rate,and control message overhead, when different architectures and networksupport mechanisms are utilized in service discovery.