Living in an increasingly networked world, with an abundant number
of services available to consumers, the consumer electronics market
is enjoying a boom. The average consumer in the developed world may
own several networked devices such as games consoles, mobile phones,
PDAs, laptops and desktops, wireless picture frames and printers to
name but a few. With this growing number of networked devices comes
a growing demand for services, defined here as functions requested
by a client and provided by a networked node. For example, a client
may wish to download and share music or pictures, find and use
printer services, or lookup information (e.g. train times, cinema
bookings).
It is notable that a significant proportion of networked devices are
now mobile. Mobile devices introduce a new dynamic to the service
discovery problem, such as lower battery and processing power and
more expensive bandwidth. Device owners expect to access services
not only in their immediate proximity, but further afield (e.g. in
their homes and offices). Solving these problems is the focus of
this research.
This Thesis offers two alternative approaches to service discovery
in Wide Area Networks (WANs). Firstly, a unique combination of the
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the OSGi middleware technology
is presented to provide both mobility and service discovery
capability in WANs. Through experimentation, this technique is shown
to be successful where the number of operating domains is small, but
it does not scale well.
To address the issue of scalability, this Thesis proposes the use of
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) service overlays as a medium for service
discovery in WANs. To confirm that P2P overlays can in fact support
service discovery, a technique to utilise the Distributed Hash Table
(DHT) functionality of distributed systems is used to store and
retrieve service advertisements. Through simulation, this is shown
to be both a scalable and a flexible service discovery technique.
However, the problems associated with P2P networks with respect to
efficiency are well documented.
In a novel approach to reduce messaging costs in P2P networks,
multi-destination multicast is used. Two well known P2P overlays are
extended using the Explicit Multi-Unicast (XCAST) protocol. The
resulting analysis of this extension provides a strong argument for
multiple P2P maintenance algorithms co-existing in a single P2P
overlay to provide adaptable performance. A novel multi-tier P2P
overlay system is presented, which is tailored for service rich
mobile devices and which provides an efficient platform for service
discovery
