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.