Context-sensitive service discovery experimental prototype and evaluation

The amount of different networks and services available to users today are increasing. This introduces the need for a way to locate and sort out irrelevant services in the process of discovering available services to a user. This paper describes and evaluates a prototype of an automated discovery and selection system, which locates services relevant to a user, based on his/her context and the context of the available services. The prototype includes a multi-level, hierarchical system approach and the introduction of entities called User-nodes, Super-nodes and Root-nodes.
These entities separate the network in domains that handle the complex distributed service discovery, which is based on dynamically changing context information. In the prototype, a method for performing context-sensitive service discovery has been realised. The service discovery part utilizes UPnP, which has been expanded in order to increase network scalability. The experimental analysis of service discovery times for different scenarios is used to optimize parameter settings of the service discovery system in order to achieve short response times.