The use of service discovery to support reconfigurable terminals

To date a significant amount of work has been conducted into the technologies required to realise reconfigurable terminals. Much of this work has been focused on adaptable hardware or lower-level protocols. However, more effort is now being directed towards reconfiguration at the system and application levels. As a result, the reconfigurable terminal is beginning to be thought of as a collection of interacting objects in a complex, distributed system. Within this context, middleware becomes an important tool to support reconfiguration, as it conceals the complexities of distributed, heterogeneous environments. One application of middleware is service discovery, a set of protocols and techniques to simplify service advertisement, location and interaction. This paper examines how service discovery might be used to support reconfiguration within a terminal environment