Robust Web Service Discovery in Large Networks

Web service discovery is a fundamental part in web service architectures. UDDI is a web service directory that was primarily intended to discover new web services in the Internet for business-to-business interaction. Another application domain of web service discovery is local area networking, where a dynamic web service discovery at runtime is required. Web Services Dynamic Discovery (WS-Discovery) is a specification that deals with local ad-hoc networks. A predefined IP multicast group is used for dynamic discovery within a subnet. In this paper we present an enhancement of WS-Discovery that allows for service lookups across subnet boundaries. We propose a dedicated proxy server, that implements cross-subnet discovery while preserving the multicast discovery within each subnet for compatibility and robustness. Thus, this technology becomes usable in enterprise-level networks.