A Comparative Study of Naming, Resolution & Discovery Schemes for Networked Environments

• Venue: CNSR '04 Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference on Communication Networks and Services Research
• Year: 2004

As the cost of computing technology isdecreasing and networks & internetworks of computersexpand in scope, the discovery and location of resourcesbecomes an essential function of the networked computingenvironment. In light of the exponential growth of theglobal Internet, with increasingly large and dynamiccomputing domains, comes the challenge of scalableresource discovery, where client applications search forresources (i.e. services or devices etc.) on the network bydescribing some attribute of interest, instead of particularresource location.This paper presents a comparative study ofvarious resource discovery, naming & resolution schemesused for heterogeneous networked environments. Theschemes we found interesting to compare are: CiscoýsDistributed Director, Service Location Protocol (SLP),Service Discovery Protocol (SDP), Intentional NamingSystem (INS) and Twine. We analyzed the characteristicsof these algorithms by comparing parameters like:scalability, robustness, optimized usage, general strengths& weaknesses of these systems and found that everysystem carries its tradeoffs. We finally summarized ourresults in conclusion based on this study.