A service discovery: a service broker approach

Mobile computing and pervasive computing introduce a more dynamic network environment. As a side-effect, location of services becomes problematic for clients accessing the services. A number of service discovery solutions aim to raise the abstraction level of the location to solve the problem; the trend is to discover services not based on network addresses but based on service usage intentions. Even though the current service discovery solutions (Bluetooth, Jini, universal Plug´N´Play, salutation, and service location protocol) succeed in doing this, they have a limited support for interoperability. Nonetheless, a need for federating service discovery domains is imminent due to the nature of mobile and pervasive computing. In this paper we design a middleware broker component, service broker, which is capable of connecting service discovery solutions. We also introduce shortly the implementation of the prototype.