Abstract
The main purpose of pervasive computing is to allow people to use computing resources embedded in our surroundings to complete their tasks effortlessly at any time, anywhere. How to deploy and find the computing resources in our environment is a big problem. Service discovery solves the problem by letting service providers publish their service and users discover their desired services through a discovery service. Most discovery services focus only on the environment they serve, but not the interoperation among different discovery services. We design and implement a hierarchical service discovery system focusing on environments that have a hierarchical structure, such as a building. We discuss why the hierarchical service discovery system serves such environments well. Our system has several features. It can let users search for their desired services according to their location and the location of the services. Our system also supports user roaming in the environment. We evaluate the overhead of our system with several experiments. We also show some applications to demonstrate the use of our system.