Service discovery strategies in ubiquitous communication environments

Past communication and computing trends are inadequate to deal with today's complex, distributed, and diverse network environments. With the recent development of small-size tetherless communication/computing devices and the increasing diversity in their capabilities, autonomic ubiquitous communication environments are emerging. In such environments, the execution of a complex task does not necessarily make use of preconfigured devices or networks, but requires instead the selection of suitable computing elements on-the-fly, based on the task requirements and device characteristics (i.e., networking-on-demand or task-centric networking). Research is currently being carried out in various dimensions in this emerging domain, including, among other approaches for context awareness, service discovery and self-management. In this article we concentrate on proposing a distributed mechanism for discovering suitable service elements on-the-fly.