Routing mechanism for secure, distributed discovery services for global Auto-ID networks

Enterprises capture immense amounts of data in Auto-ID repositories as items travel along the supply chain. For collaboration among partners individual repositories need to be discoverable when they are not explicitly linked. At the same time confidential information including supply relationships needs to be protected. The task of identifying repositories by keeping the secrets of a supply chain is done by a Discovery Service. The discovery information can be spread over multiple nodes. The routing mechanism ensures that queries sent to any node within the Discovery Service hierarchy will be forwarded to all responsible nodes. By anonymizing the request and response propagation, the repositories and Discovery Service data nodes remain hidden as long as the request did not produce an authorized result set.