An architecture for flexible service discovery in OCTOPUS

Service discovery has been drawing much attention from researchers and practitioners. The existing service discovery systems, like SLP, Jini, UPnP and Salutation, provide basic infrastructures where services can announce their presence and users can locate these services across the network. However there are several key issues which are partially solved or have not been well addressed - such as scalability, availability, dynamics and support for multiple matching mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a design for a Service Locating Manager (SLM) system which addresses some of these issues. The SLM system adopts a dynamic hierarchical tree structure and service aggregation for scalability, availability and dynamics, and introduces multiple matching mechanisms which contain an attribute-based and a semantic matching engine. It provides a scalable, distributed, dynamic and robust solution to establish a flexible service discovery architecture. We describe our concepts, architecture and implementation, and present a performance study for our prototype.