An Overlay Architecture for Information Publication and Discovery After the Composition of Registries in Ambient Networks

Ambient networks is a new networking concept for beyond 3G. An ambient network is defined as one or more network nodes or devices that share a common network control plane. Network composition is a core concept of ambient networks. It requires the composition of the different registries hosted by the composing ambient networks. These registries may be heterogeneous. Entities in a given network may also need to access information hosted by a registry in another network. This makes the problem of information discovery and publication after composition very challenging. This paper proposes a solution based on an overlay architecture. We introduce the functional entities of the overlay architecture; present the procedures and messages related to the publication and discovery of information and describe the implementation of a proof-of-concept prototype based on JXTA, a middleware commonly used in peer-to-peer settings.