Universal adaptor: A novel approach to supporting multi-protocol service discovery in pervasive computing

Service discovery is an important and challenging issue in pervasive computing. To date, many service discovery protocols have been proposed and new ones are under development. However, pervasive computing involves applications running in heterogeneous environments and application developers must cope with diversity of network infrastructures, middleware platforms, and hardware devices. There is a need for integrating or bridging these service discovery schemes in order to support the discovery of the services available in different environments. In this paper we study how to provide service discovery across different environments supported by different service discovery systems, which may use standard protocols as well as tailor-made mechanisms. We propose the Universal Adaptor (UA) approach, which consists of two major components: the Universal Adaptor Primitives (UAP) and the Universal Adaptor Mapping (UAM). UAP is the universal set of primitives used by the user to discover the services across different environments, while UAM provides the mapping between the Universal Adaptor Primitives to the primitives used in various service discovery systems. We have developed a prototype of the proposed approach and we describe the implementation issues and the experiment results.