An Architecture for Dynamic Discovery Service

The widespread deployment of inexpensive communications technology, computational resources in the networking infrastructure, and network-enabled end-devices pose an interesting problem: how to locate a particular network service or a device out of millions of accessible services and devices. Traditionally the services are registered in a centralized database that can grow exponentially in size and thus makes this approach inefficient as the load on the database and network traffic increases as more clients access the service. In addition, the centralized database becomes a single point of failure and it cannot react to the dynamic changes in service attributes and client parameters. In this paper, we present an architecture based on Java/Jini technology to achieve dynamic registration and discovery of network services. The main modules of our architecture include Lookup Service, Service Manager, Attribute Repository, and Access Control Manager. We have developed templates to register the network services and their attributes. We have implemented a proof of concept prototype system based on our architecture and will discuss few examples on how to register and dynamically discover network services.