Service Discovery Protocol Interoperability in the Mobile Environment

Yérom-David Bromberg (1) , Valérie Issarny (1)

1 ARLES - Software architectures and distributed systems

The emergence of portable computers and wireless technologies has introduced new challenges for middleware. Mobility brings new requirements and is becoming a key characteristic. Mobile devices may move around differ- ent areas and have to interact with different types of networks, services and may be exposed to new communication paradigms. Thus, mobile distributed systems need to dynamically detect and adapt their interaction protocols to interoperate with services available in the environment. As a result, middleware for mobile devices must overcome two heterogeneity issues to provide interoperability in the mobile environment, i.e, heterogeneity of discovery protocols and of inter- action protocols between services. Whereas adaptation techniques from reflec- tive middleware are suitable for the latter, it is more problematic for the former if both issues are addressed concurrently. Specifically, reflective mechanisms consume too many resources like bandwidth, memory and CPU, which are lim- ited on the mobile devices. This paper first highlights why current solutions to interoperability fail to realize service discovery protocol interoperability with both high performance and low resource consumption. Second, this paper ad- dresses this open issue by using software architecture concepts enhanced with event-based parsing techniques to provide efficient, lightweight and flexible mechanisms to bring full service discovery interoperability to any existing mo- bile platform.

Mots clés: Service discovery protocol

Domaines: Informatique ubiquitaire; Informatique mobile; Systèmes embarqués

Yérom-David Bromberg, Valérie Issarny. Service Discovery Protocol Interoperability in the Mobile Environment. 4th International Workshop, SEM 2004, Linz, Austria, September 20-21, 2004, Sep 2004, Linz, Austria. pp.64, ⟨10.1007/b107130⟩. ⟨inria-00414941v2⟩