Resource discovery in modern computing environments

Resource discovery is an integral part of many kinds of computing environments, including emerging heterogeneous environments for pervasive computing. This paper characterises a number of current and future computing environments and summarises their resource discovery requirements. It then analyses, with respect to the requirements of each environment, several established service discovery protocols and some newer protocols that are still in the research domain. In addition, the key features of a new resource discovery protocol that has been developed to operate with heterogeneous computing environments are described.