Towards a peer-to-peer content discovery and delivery architecture for service provisioning

Service provisioning includes systems and infrastructures designed for the sharing of services and any other data between users. Before services can be used, they have to be published, discovered and downloaded. These operations are supported by content distribution systems. Moreover the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) approach circumvents many problems of the Client-Server approach and offers an attractive alternative to exchange services over networked nodes. In this paper we first examine issues related to service provisioning systems. Then we present the design and the implementation of a platform allowing users to share contents like services in a P2P network. The platform is composed of a set of modules that provide means to advertise contents and discover others available on the network. The realized API can be integrated into more sophisticated application-level services. We conducted several experiments to assess the performance of the platform. Results show the efficiency and the effectiveness of our approach.