ADVANCES IN SERVICE PLATFORM TECHNOLOGIES FOR NEXT-GENERATION MOBILE SYSTEMS Service Discovery Strategies in Ubiquitous Communication Environments

Past communication and computing trends are inadequate to deal with today’s complex, distributed, and diverse network environments. With the recent development of small-size tetherless communication/computing devices and the increasing diversity in their capabilities, autonomic ubiquitous communication environments are emerging. In such environments, the execution of a complex task does not necessarily make use of prconfigured devices or networks, but requires instead the selection of suitable computing elements on-the-fly, based on the task requirements and device characteristics (i.e., networking-on-demand or task-centric networking). Research is currently being carried out in various dimensions in this emerging domain, including, among other approaches for context awareness, service discovery and self-management. In this article we concentrate on proposing a distributed mechanism for discovering suitable service elements on-the-fly