The Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) specification enables seamless
discovery, configuration, and interoperability of networked devices in various
settings, ranging from home automation and multimedia to manufacturing
equipment and data centers. Unfortunately, the sheer simplicity of event
notification mechanisms that makes it fit for resource-constrained devices,
makes it hard to scale to large infrastructures with more stringent
dependability requirements, ironically, where self-configuration would be most
useful. In this report, we address this challenge with a proposal to integrate
gossip-based dissemination in DPWS, thus maintaining compatibility with
original assumptions of the specification, and avoiding a centralized
configuration server or custom black-box middleware components. In detail, we
show how our approach provides an evolutionary and non-intrusive solution to
the scalability limitations of DPWS and experimentally evaluate it with an
implementation based on the the Web Services for Devices (WS4D) Java Multi
Edition DPWS Stack (JMEDS).Comment: 28 pages, Technical Repor