Registration and discovery of services in the NetTraveler integration system for mobile devices

The next wave of information systems to be deployed over wide-area networks features data sources residing on handheld devices, laptops, and other types of small-sized devices. Therefore, it is necessary to have middleware systems for data and resource integration that efficiently integrate clients and data sources residing on PDAs, laptops, embedded systems, and enterprise machines that are spread over a WAN. In this paper, we give an overview of the architecture of the NetTraveler system that we are building for just these purposes. We present the algorithms and schemes that we have developed to: 1) help applications self-configure with the parameters needed for their normal operations, 2) automatically register value-added services, and 3) discover connectivity metadata about available services over a cooperative system that spawns a WAN.