Service Discovery in Mobile Environments

Advent of mobile and wireless computing has changed traditional way of computing and communication based on wired networks. Users in mobile environment expect the same computing luxury which they used to enjoy in fixed computing environment. With a plethora of wireless hardware and software services present, the challenge is to determine how best we can utilize them. Service Discovery aims to simplify the use of mobile devices and services in a network by allowing them to be “discovered”, “configured” and used by other devices with a minimum of manual effort. Also since there are number of service discovery standards, it will be beneficial if they can interoperate. This paper discusses various service discovery protocols along with the bridges available to make them interoperable.