Portable Information Devices - Service Discovery

Abstract

This paper looks at how portable information devices (PIDs) can automatically discover and use services in pervasive computing environments. To realise these ubiquitous computing systems based on federation of services, we implemented a prototype printing service, although the service can be anything that one cares to define. Quite often, PID users receive documents via emails which they can access directly or notification of some documents like word documents or via text messages, or indeed just printing a web page. Their PIDs may not have the capability to download and display those documents online and if they need to read those documents urgently, one possible way is to download and print them in their vicinity. For this to happen, the PIDs need to be able to discover services like a printer service and the Jini technology makes this possible by providing spontaneous networking.