A systematic overview and comparative analysis of service discovery protocols and middlewares

Context is major source of communication, where information is gathered easily from user context due to the progress of smart and context aware systems. Even, service directory also supports the systems to response the requests, sent through client. In this paper, the authors overviews context aware systems, their sensing capabilities in location or beyond location along with COIVA (a context aware system). Eight discovery protocols along with their functionalities (such as DEAPspace, DNS-SD, JXTA, RDP, LDAP, CORBA Trader, UDDI and Superstring) are discussed and compared to evaluate the performance and efficiency of system. In addition, six middleware (such as CAMPUS, CASF, SeCoMan, CoCaMAAL, BDCaM, and FlexRFID) are compared to evaluate factors (such as Architectural style, Context abstraction/Reasoning level, Context awareness level, Contextual adaptation approaches, Decision making, and Programming model). The authors further categorized them into sub categories discussed in Section 4 and named CoCaMAAL as better middleware as compared to others.