Service discovery using FIPA-compliant AP to support scalability in ubiquitous environments

Abstract

Traditional service discovery mechanisms propose efficient and fast searching schemes for service discovery. And their schemes do not consider interoperability among discovery protocols. In this paper, we design an agent platform (AP) modifying FIPA-OS (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents Open Source) based on FIPA specifications. FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) is a nonprofit organization aimed at producing standards for the interoperation of heterogeneous software agents. Until now FIPA specifications have not been considering mobile ad hoc networks. In such environments, agents can 7 find services offered by other service discovery engines in heterogeneous networks. We can guarantee scalability, by adding DM (discovery middleware) modules in the AP. The DM helps agents find and use services exploiting existing service discoveries under ad hoc networks. We chose UPnP (universal plug and play) and LSD (lightweight service discovery protocol) as DMs among various service discovery technologies. UPnP is a set of protocols for service discovery under development by the UPnP forum and LSD is a new discovery protocol for mobile ad hoc networks emphasizing on cache management that we designed. On our AP, we can use the services which devices of UPnP and LSD provide.