On the Consistency of Soft-State Based Service Registration

Service discovery is a process that enables networked entities to be aware of available services and to obtain the necessary means to access the services. Within a service discovery architecture, the way the service data are gathered, called service registration, influences the performance of the system. In particular, it affects the consistency and query response time. Most of the existing architectures use the so-called soft-state approach with explicit deregistration. In this paper we focus on studying the advantage of this particular choice, especially its impact on the system consistency.