A Jini-based Service Locating Manager in OCTOPUS

Abstract

Today's Internet is going through a major change from a repository of information to a vehicle of services. How to facilitate users in locating these services is indeed a challenging task. The existing service discovery systems, like SLP, Jini, UPnP and Salutation, provide basic infrastructures where services can announce their presence and users can locate these services. However there are several key issues - scalability, availability, dynamics and support for multiple matching mechanisms - which are not well addressed. In this paper, we propose and design a Service Locating Manager (SLM) system which addresses some of these issues. The SLM system adopts a dynamic hierarchical tree structure and service aggregation for scalability, availability and dynamics, and introduces multiple matching mechanisms. It provides a scalable and robust solution to enable flexible service discovery architecture. We describe our concepts, architecture and implementation, and present a performance measurement for our prototype.