Jini meets UPnP: an architecture for Jini/UPnP interoperability

A service discovery framework provides a collection of protocols for developing dynamic client/server applications, allowing clients to find and use services without any previous knowledge of the locations or characteristics of the services. There are currently many service discovery, technologies available or in development, including Jini, UPnP, SLP, Salutation, Bluetooth SDP, and Ninja. These have similar high-level goals, but quite different architectures. Each software or hardware product utilizing service discovery will typically use only one of these protocols, meaning that clients and services using different technologies will not be able to cooperate. Since it is likely that several protocols will be widely used, there is a need for interoperability frameworks that allow clients and services written using different service discovery technologies to cooperate. This paper presents a Jini/UPnP interoperability framework that allows Jini clients to use UPnP services and UPnP clients to use Jini services, without modification to service or client implementations. As service specifications are typically developed independently for each protocol, a fully automatic interoperability solution is not currently practical, so we introduce service-specific proxies to bridge Jini and UPnP. Our goal is to reduce the amount of effort required to support new service types and our framework includes a substantial amount of support for rapid proxy development. A modest development effort is required to support each new service type, and our initial (and highly unscientific) measurements reveal that the level of effort is typically on the order of one day by a member of our team.