Service Discovery in Pervasive Computing Environments

Service discovery is a driving force in realizing pervasive computing. It provides a way for users and services to locate and interact with other services in a pervasive computing environment. Unfortunately, current service discovery solutions do not capture the effects of the human or physical world and do not deal well with diverse device populations; both of which are characteristics of pervasive computing environments.

This research concentrates on the examination and fulfillment of the goals of two of the four components of service discovery, service description and dissemination. It begins with a review of and commentary on current service discovery solutions. Following this review, is the formulation of the problem statement, including a full explanation of the problems mentioned above. The problem formulation is followed by an explanation of the process followed to design and build solutions to these problems. These solutions include the Pervasive Service Description Language (PSDL), the Pervasive Service Query Language (PSQL), and the Multi-Assurance Delivery Protocol (MADEP). Prototype implementations of the components are used to validate feasibility and evaluate performance. Experimental results are presented and analyzed. This work concludes with a discussion of overall conclusions, directions for future work, and a list of contributions.