DANCE: dynamic application oriented network services

The explicit usage of protocols in applications is common practice, but restricts the provided communication service. The dynamic utilization of more suitable protocols or taking into account specific user requirements is either hard to realize or even impossible. This work introduces a model which provides a service oriented view to a communication sub system. Its goal is to find the most suitable service provider. Therefore, service providers are selected dynamically at run time. This enables to take into account the requirements of both the application and the user as well as information about the current platform and network environment. Thus applications are able to benefit from uncommon protocols wherever such protocols make sense and are available. Otherwise standard protocols would be used.