Service advertisement and discovery: enabling universal device cooperation

Service advertisement and discovery technologies enable device cooperation and reduce configuration hassles, a necessity in increasingly mobile computing environments. This article surveys five competing but similar "service discovery suites" and looks at efforts to bridge the technologies. Although most of these service discovery suites promise similar functionality (namely, reduced configuration hassles, improved device cooperation, and automated discovery of required services) they come at the problem from different philosophical and technical approaches. Since none of these technologies is a superset of the others and none is mature enough to dominate the market, interoperation among them will require bridging mechanisms. The survey concludes with a review of some developments in this area.