Service Discovery in Mobile Environments

Mobile computing and mobile devices such as handhelds, laptops and even wearable computers, are changing the way we live and work. With numerous services available on the Internet, the problem of configuring the system for each service becomes a problem and is further compounded for the mobile user who moves into foreign networks that have unknown infrastructures. Service discovery aims to simplify the process of finding and also using services. Service discovery protocols enable automatic discovery of resources, device cooperation and the reduction of configuration hassles. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of two major service discovery protocols-Service Location Protocol and Jini while surveying the other protocols such as Salutation, UPnP and Bluetooth.