A Survey on Distributed Service Discovery Mechanisms with the Focus on Topology Awareness

Distributed Service (or resource) Discovery (DSD) is becoming an important research area in Service Oriented Computing (SOC) because many software applications are now developed with services from different vendors. The query routing mechanism of the current DSD applications functions purely on the overlay without incorporating the topological and routing knowledge of the underlying physical topology of the network. Consequently, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are tested to their limits due to underlay-ignorant query forwarding that are employed by the overlay applications such as Peer-to-Peer and DSD. This paper surveys the existing query routing approaches in various domains of Distributed Service Discovery and summarizes their level of awareness with respect to the underlying network topology. We have identified various characteristics required for the query routing algorithms to be intelligent and the comparisons are performed based on those characteristics.