Towards Service Discovery and Subscription based on Community-of-Interest

Current service discovery and subscription are "provider-centric " indeed, which costs the consumers too many efforts and makes the wide spectrum of QoS hard to use. In this position paper, we propose a "consumer-centric" service discovery and subscription approach. The core idea is derived from the "community-of-interest (CoI)" concept, which means the services with same or similar functionalities can form a community of the consumer's interest. This approach facilitates the consumers in three ways. Firstly, it simplifies the service discovery for the consumers who can "purely" care about the functionality and qualities instead of the providers. Secondly, it optimizes the service subscription for the consumers who just subscribe the CoI instead of a single and monolithic service provider while the COI takes charge of matching and scheduling the "best-of-breed" service automatically. Thirdly, it incarnates the wide spectrum of QoS to the consumers who will face with all possible QoS supported by the services in the CoI. The supporting framework is discussed and some key technical issues are demonstrated