A comparative study of naming, resolution & discovery schemes for networked environments

As the cost of computing technology is decreasing and networks and internetworks of computers expand in scope, the discovery and location of resources becomes an essential function of the networked computing environment. In light of the exponential growth of the global Internet, with increasingly large and dynamic computing domains, comes the challenge of scalable resource discovery, where client applications search for resources (i.e. services, devices, etc.) on the network by describing some attribute of interest, instead of a particular resource location. The paper presents a comparative study of various resource discovery, naming and resolution schemes used for heterogeneous networked environments. The schemes we found interesting to compare are: Cisco's Distributed Director, service location protocol (SLP), service discovery protocol (SDP), intentional naming system (INS) and Twine. We analyzed the characteristics of these algorithms by comparing parameters of these systems (like scalability, robustness, optimized usage, and general strengths and weaknesses) and found that every system carries its tradeoffs. We finally summarized our results based on this study.