Service Discovery in QoS-aware Component Architecture (QuA)

Abstract

The QoS-aware Component Architecture (QuA), developed by Simula Research Laboratory, is a component based adaptive middleware architecture that supports development of distributed systems which need to handle what is referred to as QoS-sensitive applications.

In a component architecture like QuA it might be desirable to make use of services which are discovered in the QuA-platform s surroundings, to offer improved services, or even provide new services which were not initially available. By implementing service discovery protocols into the QuA architecture, and thus extending the platform to support service discovery, this would be possible.

Even though most service discovery protocols in use today resemble each other in many ways, they also differ in many areas, as they often have been designed to work with a specific network protocol, or have other specific requirements they need to fulfill.

Because of this, one of the biggest challenges with integrating service discovery into QuA, is to create a solution that hides the heterogeneity of the underlying discovery protocols from the component developers, while still providing access to them so services that have been advertised using different service discovery protocols can still be found and utilized.

This thesis will present a design for extending QuA with service discovery capabilities, and show how this design can be implemented, as well as test and evaluate the proposed solution.