A service discovery: a service broker approach

Mobile computing and pervasive computing introduce a more dynamic network environment. As a side-effect, location of services becomes problematic for clients accessing the services. A number of service discovery solutions aim to raise the abstraction level of the location to solve the problem; the trend is to discover services not based on network addresses but based on service usage intentions. Even though the current service discovery solutions (Bluetooth, Jini, universal Plug'N'Play, salutation, and service location protocol) succeed in doing this, they have a limited support for interoperability. Nonetheless, a need for federating service discovery domains is imminent due to the nature of mobile and pervasive computing. In this paper we design a middleware broker component, service broker, which is capable of connecting service discovery solutions. We also introduce shortly the implementation of the prototype.