Context Attributes: An Approach to Enable Context-awareness for Service Discovery

Service discovery problem has recently been drawing much attention from researchers and practitioners. Jini, SLP, and UPnP are among the few emerging service discovery protocols. Although they seem to provide a good solution to the problem, there is an unaddressed need of more sophisticated location and context-aware service selection support. In this paper, we introduce the concept of context attribute as an effective, flexible means to exploit relevant context information during the service discovery process. Context attributes can express various context information including service-specific selection logic, client, and network condition. We describe our approach and implementation, and present the experimental results of our context-aware service discovery implementation.