Distributed Discovery and Invocation of Web Services in Infrastructure-less Dynamic Environments

Abstract

Mobile autonomous systems like robot swarms or mobile software agents operate in a dynamic environment pertaining self-organization, selfconfiguration and heterogeneity of computing entities. In such settings there is a need for autonomic publishing and discovery of resources and just-in-time integration for on-the-fly service consumption without any a priori knowledge of available services both within the execution environment and from the outside world. We propose a mediator-based distributed Web services discovery and invocation middleware. Moreover we present experimental results on an implemented robot swarm simulation environment. We propose a conceptual classification of computing entities on the basis of communication capabilities and conceptual overlay formation for query propagation. Our approach provides a loose coupling in terms of space and time and uses both Internet-based communication and RDF-based communication via messages mediators/post-boxes between entities when inter-communication between entities is not possible.