Service discovery protocols in Pervasive Computing: A review

Pervasive Computing Environments are composed of heterogeneous services. Pervasive computing applications need to discover the service(s) based on context (e.g. user preferences, user location, user activity, etc) and interact with them to perform tasks that support us in everyday life with minimal or no user distraction. This makes discovery protocols an essential requirement of Pervasive Computing. In this paper we review state-of-the-art on discovery protocols / systems and investigate their suitability in Pervasive Computing. This paper then presents some open research challenges that need to be addressed by discovery systems to meet the requirement of Pervasive Computing Environments.