Service Discovery and Broadcast

Two main components of service discovery are:Discovery Architecture and Service matching mechanism.

Service request broadcast has three disadvantages:

• Broadcast scales poorly with increasing network diameter and network size.
• It utilizes resources and computation power on all nodes of the network including nodes that do not even have the service or nodes that may not even fall in the route of the desired services.
• It ulilizes significant network bandwidth, and creates a large load on the network.

Clearly, service discovery in pervasive computing environments requires a decentralized design approach where a node should not depend on some other node(s) to advertise/register services. Each service should be autonomous and be able to advertise its presence. Moreover, the discovery should also adapt itself to reflect the changes in the vicinity.