A taxonomy for resource discovery

Abstract

Resource discovery systems become more and more important as distributed systems grow and as their pool of resources becomes more variable. As such, an increasing amount of networked systems provide a discovery service. This paper provides a taxonomy for resource discovery systems by defining their design aspects. This allows comparison of the designs of the deployed discovery services and is intended as an aid to system designers when selecting an appropriate mechanism. The surveyed systems are divided into four classes that are separately described. Finally, we identify a hiatus in the design space and point out genuinely distributed resource discovery systems that support dynamic and mobile resources and use attribute-based naming as a main direction for future research in this area. © Springer-Verlag 2004.