Service discovery in agent-based pervasive computing environments

Directory based service discovery mechanisms are unsuitable for ad-hoc m-commerce environments. Working towards finding an alternate mechanism, we developed Allia: a peer-to-peer caching based and policy-driven agent-service discovery framework that facilitates cross-platform service discovery in ad-hoc environments. Our approach achieves a high degree of flexibility in adapting itself to changes in ad-hoc environments and is devoid of common problems associated with structured compound formation in mobile commerce environments. Device capabilities and limitations, user preferences regarding device usage, application specifics with respect to mobile commerce are factors that our framework adapts to. We have described our initial implementation of Allia over ThinkPads and iPAQs by extending the LEAP Agent Platform and using Bluetooth as the underlying network protocol. In addition, we evaluated Allia's performance by running simulations of our protocol in Glomosim simulator. We also compared our framework against a structured compound-based architecture.