A Distributed Architecture for Remote Service Discovery in Pervasive Computing

Service discovery is very important in realizing the concept of pervasive computing. Consequently, service discovery protocols must be able to work in the heterogeneous environment offered by pervasive computing. Remote service discovery in particular has not been properly achieved so far. In an attempt to remedy this we propose a new architecture for enabling typical (local) service discovery mechanisms (without the ability of remote service discovery) to discover services remotely. Our architecture uses Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) as an example of local service discovery protocols, and Gnutella as an example of peer-to-peer distributed search protocols. We introduce a module called service mirror builder to the UPnP protocol, and a remote communication protocol over a Gnutella network. As a consequence, UPnP networks become able to discover services in remote networks (that is, remote service discovery).