NIST evaluates dynamic service discovery protocols. (News Briefs).Working as part of the NIST (National Institute of Standards & Technology, Washington, DC, www.nist.gov) The standards-defining agency of the U.S. government, formerly the National Bureau of Standards. It is one of three agencies that fall under the Technology Administration (www.technology. Pervasive Computing Refers to the use of computers in everyday life, including PDAs, smartphones and other mobile devices. It also refers to computers contained in commonplace objects such as cars and appliances and implies that people are unaware of their presence. Program, NIST researchers applied architectural modeling An architectural model is a tangible representation of a structure (typically a scale model) built to communicate design ideas to clients, owners, committees, customers, and the general public. to analyze the quality of service provided by dynamic service discovery protocols under conditions of network failure. Service discovery protocols allow network devices, applications, and services to advertise and discover each other's services to properly complete specific tasks. The protocols currently under investigation include Jini[TM], Universal Plug and Play, and the Service Location Protocol. NIST shared early results from the work with industry to help improve specifications for commercial products. To perform their analysis, the NIST researchers used Rapide, an architectural description language developed by Stanford University Stanford University, at Stanford, Calif.; coeducational; chartered 1885, opened 1891 as Leland Stanford Junior Univ. (still the legal name). The original campus was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. David Starr Jordan was its first president. . They transformed natural-language specifications of specific discovery protocols into architectural models that include network topologies See topology. and essential software behaviors. The architectural models are then executed using scenarios devised by the researchers to simulate network degradation and failures. During model execution, the researchers use logical assertions to gauge consistency among states maintained on different nodes. They also use quantitative metrics metrics Managed care A popular term for standards by which the quality of a product, service, or outcome of a particular form of Pt management is evaluated. See TQM. to assess latencies and overhead associated with restoring the system to a consistent state. The re-searchers produced a paper describing their approach in detail and demonstrating initial results. The current stage of the project focuses on comparative analysis of generic, alternative architectural models common to different protocols. This work appears to be particularly timely because of the proliferation proliferation /pro·lif·er·a·tion/ (pro-lif?er-a´shun) the reproduction or multiplication of similar forms, especially of cells.prolif´erativeprolif´erous pro·lif·er·a·tion n. of service discovery protocols in private industry. Results from this project will help the industry to better understand the logical and performance properties of the current generation of discovery protocols, will help to design improved versions of such protocols in future generations, and will provide practitioners of software architecture modeling with a better understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the research tools available to date. A website provides a detailed description of the project: http://www.itl.nist.gov/div897/ctg/adl/ sdp_ projectpage.html. Another relevant website is http:// w3.antd.nist.gov/net_pc.shtml. CONTACTS: Christopher Dabrowski, (301) 975-3249; christopher.dabrowski@ nist.gov or Kevin Mills, (301) 975-3618; kevin.mills@nist.gov. |
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