Network Service Description and Discovery for High-Performance Ubiquitous and Pervasive Grids

Ubiquitous and pervasive Grid computing is an emerging computing paradigm that will have a significant impact on the next-generation information infrastructure. Communication networks form a significant in-tegrant of ubiquitous and pervasive Grids and must be utilized effectively by the Grids. The notion of Grid network service may greatly facilitate integrating networking systems into the Grid architecture, and network service description and discovery play a crucial role in the network-Grid integration. Current service description and discovery technologies must be enhanced to meet the special requirements of network service description and discovery for high-performance ubiquitous and pervasive Grids. Network service description needs a model for service provisioning capability and network service discovery must be able to select those networks that meet certain performance requirements. The wide variety of networking systems in ubiquitous and pervasive Grids require general and flexible network service description and discovery approaches that are applicable to heterogeneous networks. The research presented in this article aims at developing network service description and discovery technologies for high-performance ubiquitous and pervasive Grid computing. The main contributions of this article include a general model for describing service capabilities of various networking systems, a service discovery technology for selecting network services that meet the performance requirements specified by Grid applications, and a resource allocation scheme for Grid network services to provide networking performance guarantees. The developed model and technologies are general and flexible; thus are applicable to the wide variety of heterogeneous networks in ubiquitous and pervasive Grid computing environments.