Service Discovery for Future Mobile Services

Abstract

The pervasive computing environment for heterogeneous network is on a continuous rise. The ability to interact and control network devices with different functionalities within office and home environment could be very beneficial to a lot of users. The service discovery in computers and mobile devices enabled them to interact with one another through wireless and heterogeneous wired networks. Services advertise their existence in a dynamic way and devices are designed with this capability to discover these services and its properties automatically. These devices are though based on different technologies but are still able to communicate and discover one another based on existing service discovery architectures. It is notable that a significant number of networked devices are now mobile and these mobile devices make service discovery more challenging.In future mobile multi-domain multi-language environments, a service can be anything and introduced by anybody. Consequently, same or equivalent services may have different names and services with same name or type may be completely different. Existing service discovery systems are incapable of handling these situations. We have implemented a service discovery system which supports semantics to service descriptions. It allows any user to act as a service provider and introduce any service at any time. The service provider can define any service as equivalent to any existing service and in any language as wanted. In addition, it is capable to find services that are not exact matches of the requested ones. More semantics are introduced through attributes like EquivalenceClass, ParentType and Keywords. The test conducted on this system in real time proves that the system is efficient and can be applied in real life.