Service Discovery Protocol Interoperability in the Mobile Environment

Abstract

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 different 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 interaction protocols between services. Whereas adaptation techniques from reflective 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 limited 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 addresses 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 mobile platform.