A Flexible Architecture for Wide-Area Service Discovery

Users of networked services traditionally have to know the network address of the desired service. As the network evolves from a simple infrastructure offering basic services (e.g. printers) into a sophisticated programmable infrastructure that supports a rich set of services such as virtual reality games, realtime video transcoding, and content providers, manual configuration of services becomes impractical. The Service Location Protocol (SLP) provides a dynamic configuration mechanism for the discovery of networked services. While simple SLP solutions have proven to be effective in local-area networks, solving the problem in the wide-area environment turns out to be very challenging. In this paper, we present an architecture for wide-area service discovery. Our architecture utilizes both the push and pull techniques for scalable distribution of the service information, and uses different types of Directory Agents to help the search process. Service providers and clients can find each other through a “service discovery market” which operates on our architecture.