A two-tiered approach to enabling enhanced service discovery in embedded peer-to-peer systems

Abstract

Recent technology advances are pushing towards a full integration of low-capacity networked devices in pervasive embedded P2P systems. One of the challenges of such integration is to allow low-capacity devices both to invoke and to provide services, while featuring enhanced service discovery mechanisms that are necessary to automate service invocation in pervasive environments. In this paper we present a two-tiered approach to enabling enhanced service discovery in embedded P2P systems. We first present a super-peer based overlay network featuring a matching capability aware routing of messages, and saving the resource consumption of low-capacity devices while keeping the overall network traffic low. We then present a service discovery protocol that exploits such underlying overlay network to suitably distribute service contracts on devices capable of analysing them, thus enabling enhanced service discovery even in nets mainly formed by low-capacity devices. Finally, we discuss some experimental results that confirm the viability of the proposed approach. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.