An Architecture for Interoperability of Service Discovery Protocols Using Dynamic Service Proxies

Abstract

Although all existing service discovery middlewares provide similar functionality, they are incompatible with one another due to differences in approach and architecture. We believe that co-existence of various service discovery middlewares will be indispensable since their target services and network environments are quite different to each other. Considering the future pervasive computing environment, the interoperability between them must be essential toward minimum user distraction under the heterogeneous systems. As the requirements of this interoperability system under these environment, complete translation, accommodation of changes of legacy middlewares, and simplicity of managing available services must be very important aspects. We propose a novel architecture which satisfies these requirements, using dynamic service proxy concept. While this concept provides various advantages, it has a notable drawback such that it needs to prepare many proxy codes per each service. To alleviate the load, we design and implement a Service Code Development Toolkit. We implemented a sample application and proposed architecture, and the results show that this architecture fully satisfies targeted design objectives.